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Re: Re; [Xen-users] Ethernet has Alzheimers

To: Gareth Bult <gareth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Re; [Xen-users] Ethernet has Alzheimers
From: Matthew Crocker <mcrocker@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 17:00:40 -0500
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Is the machine answering ARP replies?

Honestly, I don't know .. the machine tends to lock up for other reasons when it dies hence it's not easy to track ..

Does the upstream router have the IP & MAC in its ARP table?
Does the upstream switch have the MAC in its mac-address-table?
Assigned to the correct port?

Sounds to me like an ARP timeout problem.

This occurs between DomU's and Dom0 in addition to external addresses ... so I don't think it's linked to anything outside of Xen .. I've experienced the same problem on 4 different machines, all different HW config .. so again I think faulty HW is out.

For what it's worth;

I'm using Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) with the stock Xen 3.1 kernel all on AMD64 and Intel/Xeon machines all running 64 bit kernels and distros.

All machines are using bridging with two physical ethernet ports.
All DomU's are running two matching virtual ports.
I'm using IPTABLES (firehol) fairly heavily for port filtering.

Bridging is Layer2, IP is Layer 3, you are having a problem at layer 3 so you need to look to make sure your layer 2 stuff is working properly.

If Xen is bridging only then you won't really have visibility into the Layer 3 problem from Dom0. You could look at the bridging config and see if it knows about the MAC address properly in the switch. At some point upstream from the Xen hardware you have another Layer 3 device, most likely a router. You need to get into that router and see if it has the IP -> MAC entry in its ARP table. If it doesn't have it then there is your problem. Something is stopping the DomU from answering the ARP queries from the router. The route loses track of the MAC address and can no longer send Ethernet frames to your DomU. If your router does have the ARP entry then I would look into your switches and see if they are dropping the MAC address from their table.





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