Help! Slug takes down my network ...

Well I thought I finally had my Slug under control. With the help of 
these Yahoo groups I've figured out how to clear hung backup jobs 
and I've been successfully backing up three computers on my home 
network. I got ssh and sudo installed for secure root access. I got 
ntpclient running per the HOWTO so it keeps good time.

Then this morning my wife complained she could not print from her 
laptop. I verified this and also noticed she could no longer access 
the internet nor even bring up a Windows Explorer window. 

On a whim I pull out the Ethernet cable from my Slug. All of a 
sudden her computer works again, printing and surfing. I plug the 
Slug back into the network and it stops. I notice while the Slug is 
plugged in the network light on it is blinking constantly and so is 
the light for that port on my SMC 7004AWBR wireless router. I also 
notice none of the other computers in the house work.

An Ethereal trace from one computer shows my router has stopped 
responding to ARP requests. If I unplug the Slug, ARPs work again.

The Slug is running Unslung 3.18 and it does respond to the power 
button and shuts down. If I reboot it without the external drive 
attached it seems to boot up but immediately starts flooding the 
network again.

The previous night I had made the /unslung changes to get ntpclient 
to work per the HOWTO. I rebooted then and verified everything 
worked. I also disabled UPnP that night. My backup jobs all ran fine 
from midnight to 3 am, while I was alseep, which I verified by 
checking the backup log through the Admin web GUI about 7 am.

So in between 7 am and 9 am the Slug started this flooding behavior 
all by itself and has not recovered.

Any ideas what could be going on? I've spend many hours in the wiki 
and searching forums to get this thing working in the first place as 
a backup device. It is frustrating that it only worked well for a 
few days.

Since it is flooding the network I assume I can't use the Linksys 
Setup to flash it back to factory. Is there anything I could do at 
the Redboot prompt to recover? What about the Sercomm utility?

Will this be a stable backup device for my network in the longterm? 
It is nice that it is a cool little Linux box to play with, but I 
did buy it to do an important job.

Thanks for any advice.

Nathan





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