Weird behavior on network shells. e.g.: nanosleep hangs forever

[Frederic Olivie <alf@club-internet.fr>]

Hi,

When connecting to this box with either ssh or telnet, I
experience very weird behaviors :

- ssh delays typed characters (each time I type in something,
it displays the previous character I typed). Like if the output
buffer would be flushed one step late.

- top won't display.

- And, the most intriguing : nanosleep will hang forever.
The top problem seems related to the nanosleep one (according
to strace).
The ssh one, maybe also. I haven't been able to trace properly.

I could reproduce this easily with "strace sleep 1".
The last line gives : nanosleep({1, 0}
and hangs there until interrupted by a ctrl-c (or, I guess lots
of different signals).

1) It does NOT happen on the console.
2) It does happen sometimes suddenly (even if idle for a while).
I know that the definition of "sudden" seems weird, but it's the case.
3) If I disconnect the network cable and reconnect it, the problem
disappears.....

The box is :

- DELL Dimension 8100
- Pentium 4 1.3G
- 512M RAMbus (non-ECC)
- SuSE 7.3 with recompiled kernel 2.4.16.SuSE + freeswan 1.92
- No load at all. Nothing on the box yet. I actually just
work on different scripts for configuring it (so, emacs + ssh).
- 2 network interfaces:
	* 1 builtin 3c905C which I use
	* 1 added basic PCI 8139 chipset card. Unused. Unconfigured.

The problem might be tied in some way to the 3c59x driver. I can't tell.
I have not toroughly tested the other interface yet.

Previously, I'd use the stock SuSE 7.3 kernel (2.4.10.SuSE). The problem
would happen much more often. It's the first time since I upgraded
to 2.4.16.SuSE (I shut it down often. Last uptime ~ 22h before the
problem).

I know this sounds weird, and I also know I don't bring in much help.
I'm ready for any testings any of you guys would be interested in.

Thanks a lot in advance for any help.

--
Frédéric Olivié (Alf)
Mailto: alf@club-internet.fr
Phoneto: +33 603 03 33 50

Very funny Scotty... Now beam down my clothes (Capt. James T. Kirk.
Starship Enterprise).