We have a problem with the network card on a Dell Power Edge R410 with Debian 6 (squeeze). It seems that the network card went into "sleep" mode after some time. If we are connected via ssh to the server, the connection drops after a certain period of inactivity. If we then ping the server, it doesn't answer to the first packets, but after 5-10 seconds it's answering again.
Here are the configuration details:
OS:
2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Wed May 18 23:13:22 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux
NIC Driver:
Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5716 Gigabit Ethernet bnx2 v2.6.29-11:26
driver: bnx2
version: 2.0.2
firmware-version: 5.0.11 NCSI 2.0.5
bus-info: 0000:01:00.0
UPDATE: I'm not sure, but maybe not only the network card but the whole server went to sleep mode. I can't see anything in /var/log/messages when it happends, if someone knows haw I can increase the loglevel to see more let me know.
Best Answer
Not an expert on either Linux, but perhaps its related to power settings?
Most servers/OSs have settings to control power consumption and they can turn off or put to sleep some hardware components if they're idle for some time. Perhaps squeeze is configured by default to allow the NIC to go to sleep, or maybe this setting is configured in the BIOS of the server and the OS just doesn't override it.
Check the settings in the BIOS and OS. In the BIOS it should be under POWER.