Ethernet hangs on G4 Mini at random times

Question

Hello, all. Running an old G4 Mini here, got a wierd problem. Not certain if I'm getting close to hardware failure or what. Every few days, the network stack pretty much 'hangs' -- I'm able to see some traffic on the wire, but not everything. My ethernet interface error count (via netstat -i in a shell) is going up (at least on en0, the wired interface), but I'm not seeing certain packets returning (like DNS responses), nor will my Wifi come online after I start seeing the problem. I end up having to reboot the box to fix it.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Thanks, I'll give that utility a shot the next time this happens.
Resolv.conf reports the resolvers as correct. Again, I'm watching the ethernet traffic, both using tcpdump on the box in question and on the target box (it's a standard Linux system functioning as a NAT router and firewall). I see the DNS request from the MINI on both boxes, but I only see the response being sent -- I never see the packet arrive on the Mini. I only see the Input Error count on the interface increasing.
Restarting the router in question has not helped when this is occuring. Neither has restarting the intervening ethernet switches. Even when this is occuring, I've plugged directly into my cable modem, and still get the same result. In fact, this same problem messes with DHCP! (I work for my local cable company as a Unix engineer -- I've sat on our DHCP servers and watched the traffic).
Since I'm actually seeing the requested traffic leave the box, but desired responses come back, I seriously doubt it's a cache issue. I'll definitely try that utility just in case it actually IS a cache problem, however.
I'm thinking that either the hardware is getting into a funky state (dmesg shows nothing from the kernel logs) or the driver is. Is there a way to unload and reload the ethernet drivers for the interfaces themselves, or the ethernet stack? My BSD-fu is somewhat weak, comparitively... And it seems like a reset somewhere in there is helping this.