Realtek 8139 driver or sucky hardware?

[Silviu Marin-Caea <silviu@delrom.ro>]

I have a server that had a Realtek 8139 card that worked nicely under
normal circumstances.

But I made a mistake in a crontab and I had 60 instances of a backup
script starting one per minute, all of them wishing to create the same
.tar.gz into a samba mounted share.

This crazy situation had the server freeze solid, with only cold boot as
remedy.

No matter what stupid things I do on it, I shouldn't be able to take the
kernel down, right?

After I replaced the Realtek with a 3com, I could see all of the 60
instances fighting like worms in shit, but the server survived.

Kernel 2.4.5 compiled with Red Hat gcc 2.96-81.  With kgcc, it was
acting the same way.

Please CC me.

Thank you.

-- 
Systems and Network Administrator - Delta Romania
Phone +4093-267961