*nix boxes forgetting network exists, or network forgetting they exist

[CTho9305]

For some reason, all the *nix webservers I know of in my dorm stop responding to pings/other requests if they are inactive for a period of time (not sure how long it is). Once they've stopped responding to the world, ONLY machines on the same hub or switch can reach them. However, once they are pinged/accessed, the behavior becomes normal until they disappear again. Last year, in a different dorm, my linux box was fine... this year, I have the problem.

My windows apache box (and all other win32 servers) work fine all the time. What could be causing this? We've worked around the problem by setting up a cron job to do a single ping to localhost every minute, but that is pretty crude.

Any ideas?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Just webservers or all *nix machines? DHCP? Is this a Microsoft network *shudder*?

 

[smp]

Yeah .. the cron job would be pretty crude. I have little experience, so I can't help you, but I'm assuming that all your nix boxes are running the same distro?
If not, then it's probably not the actual nix boxes, but maybe your network hardware ??? maybe your switch or something?

This reminds me though, of a quote I heard from IRC;

I can't find my computer. I mean, I can ping it, it works fine I know it's in my apartment somewhere, but I just can't _find_ it.

 

[CTho9305]

I'm not sure. All the *nix machines my friends and I run are webservers. The ones that are used as desktops are generally active (gaim, mozilla) so I dont know.


blacktop.res.cmu.edu runs rh7.3
cmushot.res.cmu.edu runs debian potato
c2h5oh.res.cmu.edu runs rh5.2
I'm not sure about the gentoo boxes, but they have been down for a couple weeks so I can't check. When they were, up, they had an average traffic of 250kb/sec 24/7, so they were never idle long enough (don't ask 😀)

I don't think it is an MS network... Cisco routers, Cisco switches, whatever that means. As I said before, in a different dorm, my linux box (c2h5oh) never had this problem, so could there be something specific about this building's network hardware?