FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-p4 workstation losing Ethernet connection every
48 hours or so, requiring a reboot
reddit / BSD

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E39M5S62 · 2020-05-04 18:16

What motherboard do you have, and more specifically what NIC are you
using? When did you last do an OS update?

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jdrch · 2020-05-04 18:34

> motherboard

Dell OptiPlex 390 SFF, as the link in the OP says.

> what NIC are you using?

Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller.

> When did you last do an OS update?

```
% sudo freebsd-update fetch
Password:
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 12.1-RELEASE from
update2.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.

No updates needed to update system to 12.1-RELEASE-p4.
```

Just ran a `# pkg upgrade` too, with the latest `pkg` repos.

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E39M5S62 · 2020-05-04 18:58

I mean, did you do an OS update just before things started going
haywire? I'm trying to correlate any changes in the environment to the
new behavior you're seeing ...

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jdrch · 2020-05-04 19:04

Ah, fair enough. Here's my complete history from 2020-04-27 through
2020-05-02. Since so far the issue is showing up every 2 days and I
wake up to it in the morning (it's happening overnight) I think that
should be sufficient:

```
   492 2020-04-27 12:41:31 cd /etc
   493 2020-04-27 12:41:51 sudo mv periodic.conf periodic.conf.bak
   494 2020-04-27 12:42:00 exa
   495 2020-04-27 12:42:15 exa | fzf
   496 2020-04-27 12:43:09 cd ~
   497 2020-04-27 12:53:14 exit
   498 2020-05-02 10:32:03 ifconfig
   499 2020-05-02 10:32:47 exit
   500 2020-05-02 10:33:09 sudo pkg update
   501 2020-05-02 10:33:26 sudo pkg upgrade
   502 2020-05-02 12:06:59 sudo pkg autoremove
   503 2020-05-02 12:07:09 exit
```

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orangetoaster · 2020-05-04 21:18

Have you replaced the network cable and tried a different switch port?
I have had both of those fail on systems unexpectedly. In the case of
the network cable it was on a server that had variable load on it, one
of the pins had a bad connection and would get enough thermal
contraction during idle load times to cause disconnect issues. Don't
rule out switch and cable issues (although cable issues seems unlikely
because of the reboot), it might be error counts shutting down the
switch port.

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jdrch · 2020-05-04 22:52

> replaced the network cable and tried a different switch port

Gonna try the latter and then the former if the symptoms repeat,
thanks!