ed1 network problems on laptop

[Michael A. Smith]

I've got a Sony VAIO PCG-FX101 (vanilla Celeron 600 laptop). It's run
FreeBSD without a problem before. I just installed a new hard drive and
installed 4.8-RELEASE on it. Now, I'm having all kinds of network
problems that I didn't have a few days ago with the exact same
hardware/OS (except the hard drive). I'm using a SMC PC-Card NIC (comes
up as ed1).

When I try to cvsup my source tree or ports, I get a message like this:

TreeList failed: Network write failure: Connection closed

That's not the only error I've seen while cvsupping, but the only one
I've seen today. It happens every time I try to cvsup.

When FTPing anything, the connection hangs mid-session (unless it's a
small up/download). I've been able to install some ports, but usually
they hang on the FTP download.

When SSHing to other hosts, I can go merrily along, but within five or
ten minutes, I lose the connection.

SOME SUCCESS
I was able to successfully cvsup my source tree and ports tree AND
portinstall XFree86-4 and xcfe4 (big downloads, LOTS of dependencies).
The way it worked was this: I'd tried and tried to cvsup without luck. I
left the machine on and went to the office. FROM MY OFFICE FREEBSD
MACHINE, I was able to log into my home machine, su to root, flawlessly
cvsup and portinstall a bunch of things. I thought my problems were
somehow solved -- WRONG. When I try doing any of those things from the
machine itself, I can't.

Since I was able to cvsup remotely, I've rebuilt my whole system (world
and kernel) to 4.8-STABLE.

SOME TRIAL-AND-ERROR
I've done web searches on the error string above and found people with
the same problem (apparently), but no definitive solution. I've made
sure that there's no IRQ conflict with the NIC (it shared IRQ 3 with the
sio1, which I've commented out of the kernel and rebuilt). I've also
made sure the laptop's BIOS is set for a non-PNP OS.

I had 4.8-STABLE running on this machine a few days ago (on a too-small
hard drive) without a hitch. No network glitches at all. Argh.

Any clues?? I don't wanrt to re-install from scratch -- and doubt it
would do any good!

-- 
Michael A. Smith <msmith at code-fu.com>
Programmer at Large