Ever since I replaced a Belkin network switch with a new D-Link DGS-1216T gigabit switch my Fedora server has been crashing when copying large files to it using Samba or Secure FTP. There was nothing in the log files or console messages to suggest the cause, so I scoured blogs and forums for answers. What I discovered is that I am certainly not the only person suffering from system crashes during large file transfers on Fedora 12. The most common suggestion for is to disable ‘scatter-gather’ in the ethernet card settings (ethtool -K eth0 sg off), but this did not address the problem in my case.

I suspect there is a bug in the Linux sky2 ethernet driver for the Marvell 88E8057 NIC, which is embedded on my Shuttle SA76G2 XPC barebone. Quick solution – disable the onboard Marvell NIC and install an Intel Gigabit PRO/1000CT PCIe adapter which uses the e1000e driver.

Since installing the new Intel NIC I’ve not experienced a single lock-up so far. This is unfortunately just the latest example of Fedora costing me money to work around the instabilities of supposedly supported hardware.