Problem with 3c905b

[Patrick Robert Aland]

I have a 3c905b running on RedHat 5.1 with Kernel 2.1.125
I am noticing a few errors that I have not been able to fix.
The first is that my network connectivity will suddenly stop and if I look
in the messages file i see LOTS (like hundreds) of lines that say:

kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e000.
and then it says
kernel: eth0: Tx Ring full, refusing to send buffer.

Sometimes doing a /etc/rc.d/init.d/network stop and then start will fix
this but most of the time I have to reboot.

During boot the netcard initialization is as follows:

eth0: 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at 0x6100, 00:10:4b:9c:ca:93, IRQ 11
  8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split, 10baseT interface.
  Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.
3c59x.c:v0.99E 5/12/98 Donald Becker 
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/
IP-Config: Incomplete network configuration information.

I cannot seem to determine what is causing the IP-Config error because I
never got one with my old net-card.(An ne2000 PCI)

Has anyone seen this problem in the past and if so were they able to
resolve it? Thanks.


--Patrick Aland
--Stetson University