Middle-earth and the Digital Infarction
It was supposed to be a relaxed evening. I had finally convinced my girlfriend to watch the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition with me. The mood was good, the elves were marching into Helm's Deep. But right around 10 PM, everything went dark. The entire LAN was dead. No streaming on the TV and no internet on the PC. The strange thing was that the Wi-Fi on my Fritzbox 7690 was still working…
On a seemingly ordinary evening, plans for a relaxed movie night with the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition took an unexpected turn. As the evening progressed, the internet connection in the house was abruptly cut off. The Wi-Fi remained functional, but all devices connected via cable were rendered inactive. Initial suspicion fell on a misconfigured Docker container, leading to the disabling of a suspicious container.
However, the issue persisted, occurring again during movie viewing. Upon further investigation, error messages appeared regularly in the kernel logs, indicating a problem with the network card's ring buffers. The culprit appeared to be Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE), which was causing the network card to freeze. Three steps were taken to resolve the issue: disabling Energy Efficient Ethernet and interrupt throttling in the driver settings, turning off offloading functions, and creating a systemd service to ensure these adjustments persisted after each reboot.
Once these changes were implemented, the network remained stable, allowing for a successful movie night without interruptions.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
