November 3, 2006

Strange OS X Ethernet Behavior Driving Me Batsh*t

I've stumbled upon a strange and frustrating problem on my MacBook Pro this week and it's driving me crazy. Through various tests in the last few days, I've narrowed the problem down to a recognizable pattern, but I've yet to determine if there is anything I can do to fix it. More than anything, though, my frustration stems from not being able to determine why this problem has suddenly cropped up.

I first ran into the problem around Wednesday morning. iChat Video has replaced the telephone for most conversations that I have with my Mom. If we're both at our computers (which is a lot of the time... at least in my case), clicking the green camera icon in the Buddy List is easier than picking up the telephone. We do this a lot and seldom, if ever, have any problems outside of the occasional blips typical of real-time data traversing the wild and woolly Internet.

Starting that morning, we couldn't keep a connection going for more than a few minutes before it would freeze and spit out an error indicating the other end hadn't sent any data for ten seconds. This, of course, annoyed me to no end and I started looking for some kind obvious cause.

Three days later and after numerous elaborate experiments, I've opened Pandora's Box and I believe I've found a reproducible pattern.

In a nutshell, nearly every time my Mac blurps out a seemingly normal IGMP Membership Report (V1 & V2), it goes mute for anywhere from a couple of seconds to tens of seconds before returning to normal. Of course, a span of that many seconds will cause the iChat Video stream to crash and burn (as well as stall downloads, delay web page loading, etc).

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