Ok, here is a real puzzler. I have a Compaq DL360 running RedHat 9, kernel 2.4.20, which I use as a network monitor. I am constantly pinging several remote hosts.

If one of the remote hosts goes down, obiviously I start getting destination host unreachable messages from the ping command. However, once the remote computer comes back up, I CONTINUE to get destination host unreachable for that computer. In fact, ping will continue to fail unless I do a network stack restart, or reboot the linux box.

I was having this same problem when running RedHat 7.3, and thought maybe upgrading would help, but it did not.

Suggestions?

Thanks!
Chris

are you pinging the hosts by ip address or by hostname?
are you using dhcp or static ip?

I get the same results whether I ping by IP or hostname. All machines involved have static IPs.

sounds like a DNS or hardware problem. Are you using Bind?

This problem happens when using IPs only, so I don't think it's DNS related. (I haven't had any other DNS related problem with this machine). As far as being hardware related, I could easily be convinced that it is a quirk in the kernel driver for this particular NIC.

who manufactured the NIC?

From /proc/pci:
Intel Corp. 82544EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 2)

Using the e1000 driver.

I should point out a mistake I made in my original post. The server is a Dell PowerEdge 1650.

ftp://ftp.dell.com/network/Intel_LAN..._RH9_08.tar.gz

Start there.