NIC drops all packages

[Mark]

Thanks for the reply. See below for my comments...

> There are a lot of thinks I have seen do this.
> 
> 1) ACPI used when APM?? should be used. (or the reverse)
Oops, no idea what that means...

> 2) Hard drives that spin down and won't spin up again. (see #1, 3)
> 3) Buggy BIOS or BIOS setup for power management wrong.
>    (My system has buggy BIOS and randomly on upgrades will 
> not shut down
> properly.)
> 4) Hard drives, memory, or other hardware going bad.
> 5) Hardware conflicts (especially on booting).
> 6) Non-discript bugs.
So, basically anything hardware-related that nobody will ever find unless
they spend countless hours on replacing everything one-by-one.
And since there is no way to reproduce it, one will never really know if the
part replaced really was the problem or if it just conincidentally has not
happened yet... That basically means throw the whole machine away - or use
it for non-mission critical stuff like as a test box, etc. That's what I was
afraid of...

> 
> Look in /var/messages for error messages.
Didn't find anything out of the ordinary...
> Run memtest (from the grub boot screen)
Did that, ran all night, 100% pass.

In the meantime, I let the machine run over the weekend - just sitting idle,
more or less. No more crashes/hangups.
Then I ran a bunch of scp's, up2dates for all installed packages, more
installs, etc. and it did all of this without problems.

Hell, how I hate (seemingly) random problems like this!!!! Makes me want to
switch to becoming a golf-pro or flight instructor or whatever else ;)

MARK