Tom Brandt sent me the following email privately, but I'm going break
netiquette and post the answer I gave to Tom to the entire list, if for no
other reason than the advice is generally applicable to a wide range of
problems.

Wirt Atmar

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Tom,

> Well, its either the LAN card in the 918, the thinlan cables, connectors or
>  the hub. The cables, connectors and hub are absolutely ancient, predating
>  the 918 be several years. I'm in the process of swapping them out
>  individually to try to isolate the problem.

My primary advice still stands. Make your LAN as simple as you possibly can
first and work your way out from there. It's also important to remember that
software is never intermittently flaky; it's always deterministic in its
behavior. If you're experiencing intermittent failures, that failure mode has
to be because of the analog world that lives beneath the digital one.
Something is on the edge of working reliably -- and that can be anything from
a poor mechanical connection to an analog amplifier inside a chip that's
failing due to either age or heat.

However, I would suspect the cabling first. Here you often have non-soldered,
corrosion-prone mechanical connectors that you are trusting to make good
connections.

Best,

Wirt

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