Dropped packets

[CARLH]

Following the directions from this site, on a new Pogo-E02 I've successfully installed "Linux version 3.1.7-2-ARCH (nobody@americium) (gcc version 4.6.2 20111223 (prerelease) (GCC) ) #1 PREEMPT Sat Jan 14 15:45:38 UTC 2012" onto an 8GB SD card in a card reader plugged into the front USB port.

I noticed an occasional hiccup in my SSH PuTTY session and found when running a continuous ping to the plug, there would be a timeout every 20-25 pings.

Then I plugged in an external drive (3 partitions, 2 of them NTFS) to a USB port in the back. At first, this seemed to lock everything up when attached after the plug was already booted, and the system would never respond if booted with the external drive attached. But without doing anything in particular, it just started working, including coming up after a reboot. However, ping timeouts are more frequent, now occurring every 5-15 pings.

Checking top, there's very minor CPU usage and 223MB free memory (no swapfile).

I've done little customization so far, other than setting a static IP, hostname, and installing openntpd and setting a time server. A bunch of packages requested to be updated when installing openntpd and I let that happen.

Any suggestions for updates or settings to improve the network response?

[CARLH]

Update: for whatever reason, the dropping of packets stopped. Ping times which were all over the map have also become consistently under 5 ms (previously, the ping times were 20-30 ms most of the time).

Can anyone explain this? Seems like something was going on that has now stopped.

And for whatever reason, a reboot or cold boot with both the flash and external USB drives attached no longer works. Although the front indicator shows amber the same as always, there's no response on the static IP so I presume the flash drive has not booted. And the external USB drive shouldn't be bootable (although it has an active Windows partition which I'm going to disable and see whether that does anything).

[WilburMonkey]

I just got arch installed on a PogoPlug E02 and I'm also getting a lot of dropped rx packets, something like 50%. This is a vanilla install, except that I followed moonman's instructions to update the firmware for netconsole and to use an ext3 boot volume (a step that seems to be missing from the main install instructions).

Would love some advice on how to fix this. I would try updating via pacman first, but the high rx error rate makes this problematic.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '[root@alarm ~]# uname -a
Linux alarm 3.1.10-15-ARCH #1 PREEMPT Wed Dec 12 15:25:18 UTC 2012 armv5tel GNU/Linux')

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
[root@alarm ~]# ifconfig -a
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.1.83 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
inet6 fe80::225:31ff:fe02:dc41 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 00:25:31:02:dc:41 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 118856 bytes 9034390 (8.6 MiB)
RX errors 65768 dropped 65768 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 8642 bytes 807062 (788.1 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
device interrupt 11

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 16436
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10<host>
loop txqueuelen 0 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 66 bytes 7348 (7.1 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 66 bytes 7348 (7.1 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
')