[conspire] running ifconfig - getting errors and collisions

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

Darlene, almost certainly completely unrelated to your DSL-connectivity
problem, but I happened to notice something else in your shell
transcript:

> $ /sbin/ifconfig
> eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:79:FF:A2
>            inet addr:68.183.66.92  Bcast:68.183.66.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>            inet6 addr: fe80::2d0:b7ff:fe79:ffa2/64 Scope:Link
>            UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>            RX packets:151416 errors:258 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:258
>            TX packets:111640 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>            collisions:139 txqueuelen:1000
>            RX bytes:168631221 (160.8 MiB)  TX bytes:11995948 (11.4 MiB)

Unless you snipped it for posting purposes, your lack of a loopback
interface (in that ifconfig output) points to a very significant
problem:  The system talks directly to interface "lo" for many internal
purposes, and without it being valid will overfill the ARP table and
misbehave in a number of odd ways.  "/sbin/ifconfig" output should look
more like this:

:r! /sbin/ifconfig

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:D0:B7:93:31:0E  
          inet addr:198.144.195.186  Bcast:198.144.195.191  Mask:255.255.255.248
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3535193 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4409696 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:385031484 (367.1 MiB)  TX bytes:4089228639 (3.8 GiB)
          Interrupt:11 Base address:0x1080 Memory:fa202000-fa202038 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:127975 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:127975 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:63546236 (60.6 MiB)  TX bytes:63546236 (60.6 MiB)

(eth0 does exist, but is currently unconfigured on the server host in
question.  To include unconfigured interfaces in /sbin/ifconfig reports,
use the "-a" option.)