Bug Reports

Hi,

I started using m0n0wall 1.236 (generic-pc) about a month ago. m0n0wall box is an ancient PC (Pentium 150 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, 2 Realtek 100 mbps NICs and 32 MB CF card) connected to WAN through static IP connection (cable modem).

First I noticed that sometimes when dowloading files with browser (IE and Chrome) downloads freeze. So I made a test - 700 MB iso dowload from http server with wget (win32): "connection timed out" occurs about 5-12 times during the download. When the WAN cable is plugged directly to Windows XP machine (without router) - no such errors occur.

At first I thought that there may be some hardware problems with that ancient PC. Tested RAM with memtest86+ - RAM is ok; swapped one spare NIC I found around (SMC branded; dc driver) first with WAN NIC and later with LAN NIC - same problems. Then tried m0n0wall 1.3b18 - works fine, no dropped connections.

Then tried all the older versions of 1.2 branch to find out when the bug (if it is bug) was introduced. With all of the versions below I experienced connection timeouts:
1.236
1.235
1.234
1.233
1.232
1.231
1.23
1.22
1.21
1.2

Then tried 1.11 - seems ok; just downloaded 3GB file from http server and got not a single connection timeout.

Edit: don't know if it's relevant, but when using 1.236 and/or 1.235, enabling or disabling "Use device polling" doesn't cure timeouts.

I get similar things, but I see "re1: Watchdog timeout" and similar when it is happening.

The Realtek cards appear to be "realcrap."