OpenBSD 2.4 Network Weirdnesses

[John-Paul Pagano <jpagano@inven.com>]

Hi,

I've noticed that my OpenBSD 2.4 box, which I'm using as a firewall, will
sometimes drop connectivity on its external network interface
spontaneously.  It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does, no configuration
changes precipitate the drop-off; the external interface just suddenly
loses it's default route.  Frustratingly, although I manually re-add the
default route, I still get annoyingly persistent "host is down" messages
when I try to ping either in the immediate subnet or outside of it.  I know
the machines I'm pinging are up.

Today, I did in fact specifically precipitate the problem by changing the
domain name on the internal network interface of the firewall.  But, again,
the problem is occuring on the external interface, which makes the
ostensibly causal relationship between the reconfig and the failure suspect.

Anyway, just wondering if there are any reported bugs with the networkng
facilitiesd on the very earliest release of 2.4 (I compiled mine from
source code a week or two before the CD release).

Also, I am seeing a very strange problem on this machine in which I can't
ping hostnames or FQDNs that are listed in the /etc/hosts file on this box.
 I can reach these machines by IP address, but not by name.  Very weird.
Even weirder, this seems to be the case only some of the time.

--
John-Paul Pagano
Unix Systems Administrator
Voice: (212) 208-0828
Fax: (212) 825-1040