Mystery eth0 inactivation!?

I am in the process of setting up a Linux box for some small scale web
development and ran into a curious problem in this system:

- Old HP Vectra with 256M memory (i know)
- 3Com Etherlink (309) adapter
- Red Hat 8.0 Server installation with all modules,
- Apache 2
- mySQL
- PHP 4

Everything works as nicely as can be expeced with the amount of memory
available. eth0 works beautifully, except when the machine has been
idle for some time. When resuming I always find out that the eth0 is
in "inactive" state and it is not possible to reactivate it. Attempts
just result in a laconic message "could not reactivate interface". No
difference whether I am root or something else. None of the options
available from the RH 8 graphic network conf tools can fix the
problem. Yet rebooting always works and as long as i keep working,
everything is OK. What is going on here, any ideas anyone? Is this a
misfeature of the adapter or is there a broken power-saving feature
somewhere that i cannot find?
All responses appreciated,
-Martti

-Martti

--
E pur, si muove!
Ei per..., se on muovia!

Hi,

"Martti Paalanen" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
[snip]
> Everything works as nicely as can be expeced with the amount of memory
> available. eth0 works beautifully, except when the machine has been
> idle for some time. When resuming I always find out that the eth0 is
> in "inactive" state and it is not possible to reactivate it. Attempts
> just result in a laconic message "could not reactivate interface". No
> difference whether I am root or something else. None of the options
> available from the RH 8 graphic network conf tools can fix the
> problem. Yet rebooting always works and as long as i keep working,
> everything is OK. What is going on here, any ideas anyone? Is this a
> misfeature of the adapter or is there a broken power-saving feature
> somewhere that i cannot find?

Have you had a poke around the BIOS? I had a very old system
once that the BIOS power saving features randomly powered down
the PCI bus etc when no activity happened. Windows used to
continue to work fine when you moved the mouse or whatever
but Linux never could. I /think/ the setting was something fairly
obvious when I had a look.

I take it that you know it's inactivity and not something else
entirely? If you leave a ping running with a 30 second delay or
so, does the problem still occur?

Cheers,

Dave.