Problem maintaining an Ethernet connection: a follow-up
Problem maintaining an Ethernet connection: a follow-up
I too have experienced this problem on all of our B&W G3's, Lombard PowerBook G3's and G4's. I found that doing the following will fix this issue:
- Trash the AppleTalk Preferences file. Don't try to empty the Trash yet, it will complain that the file is in use.
- Select Shut Down from the Special menu.
- Start up the machine and zap the PRAM (command, option, P, R).
- Once it boots, you might have to re-create any custom AppleTalk settings in the AppleTalk control panel that were used by the Location Manager. Now empty the Trash.
- It might give you a "your AppleTalk network is not available" occasionally upon reboot but I've not seen the connectivity issues persist since I did this to all (35) Macs I am in charge of.
By the way, the not-yet-released Mac OS 9.0.1 fixes this.
Patrick Lakey found a different solution: "There seems to be an auto-negotiating issue with some hubs; I replaced my Ethernet hub, and all is well now."
Rich McCormick-Carroll suggests that Apple TIL article #30922 (Spanning Tree Protocol: AppleTalk Issues) may help explain the cause of at least some cases of this problem.
Finally, a source that wishes to remain anonymous suggests that none of these explanations are the true cause:
This is a well known and long standing problem with Open Transport and there's no intention to fix it with the pending OS X. While it is possible that a 3rd party card will alleviate the issue, the only guaranteed solution is to restart the CPU. In short, this can and does happen on any CPU, it's just showing up more frequently with OS 9.0While there are known issues with the Sawtooth motherboard it is only with extremely heavy traffic. It has nothing to do with G4's. It has nothing to do with USB Card Support software. It has nothing to do with the Entrega USB hub. We have tested both the Asante 10 Mbit card and the 10/100s and they are affected as well.
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