Linux Token Ring Support Bringing Down Corporate Nets?

mjh asks: "I've been running Debian GNU/Linux on my company supplied laptop for 3 months now. I got permission from my manager to run it on the network, but I did not go through the somewhat rigorous process of getting the software certified. I have legitimate business reasons for using it on the corporate network (which is why my manager approved it). I even managed to get Lotus Notes to run under wine so I never had to boot into Winders at all (unless someone sent me a PPT doc). I was pretty happy...until I brought the entire network down." Anyone else running Linux on a Token Ring network who would care to talk about their own experiences?

"My company runs Token Ring at the office (puke!) I got drivers from the card manufacturer (Madge), and I'd been happily churning along. Then last week, we started seeing a bunch of errors on the network. These errors would bring everyone on the ring down. After a week of this kinda stuff, they eventually isolated it to me.

Reboot the laptop into Windows and the network card works just fine and they don't see any ring errors. Reboot into linux, and suddenly they start seeing ring errors. I don't really grok token ring, so I'm not entirely certain that I know exactly what the problem is. But, whenever I brought the token ring on line under linux, they saw ring errors, which eventually (as I understand it) would bring down the entire ring. Switch cards (same model) and it continues to happen. It looked to me (and the network analysts) that the Linux driver was causing the problem.

I tried switching to an IBM token ring card, but there's a bug and I hadn't patched for this. The people with the fluke would not wait around while I tried to figure this out. I didn't have any other token ring cards that I could try.

In the end, I agreed not to boot into Linux unless I went into the conference room (which is one of the only rooms in the building with ethernet ports). How should I have done this differently so that using Linux would have been a more positive experience for my company?"

Comments

actually

[Leimy]

I have heard the same story of a certain linux box bringing down a certain subnet of a certain university.

of this I am certain

Possible solution

[Chakat]

How should I have done this differently so that using Linux would have been a more positive experience for my company?"

The same way you test any new solution you're going to bring in to the company, slowly, under controlled circumstances. You sould have asked your boss for a loaner PC and token ring lobe (hope that's the right terminology for the technology) and made sure that your setup wouldn't screw up the network. For testing, try pure torture - try huge pings, small pings, flood pings, stack ssh sessions so they zip back and forth between the two machines a couple dozen times, just make sure that any failures happen where you don't have to incur the wrath of your co-workers.

Don't just throw things on a corporate network, 'cuz that's where trouble starts.

Imagine if this was Windows...

[cperciva]

Imagine if it was Microsoft which had the buggy Token Ring drivers. We would have

1. Posts complaining that micro$oft can't do anything right because it is closed source, and if it was open source they wouldn't have these problems.

2. Posts arguing that Microsoft deliberately sabotaged the drivers because they want to force people to stop using Token Ring.

3. Posts asking why anyone is still using Windows since it is obviously inferior to Linux.

Slashdot... Open Source, Closed Minds indeed.