[ale] Why is my switch dropping me?

[Eric Webb]

I have a RH5.2 box with a 3Com 3C905B-TX plugged into a Cabletron Smartswitch
6000 series.  In short: the switch seems to randomly drop my port for random
periods of time.  I seem to lose all outside connectivity during this time. 
This even seems to happen when I'm in the middle of a telnet session
actively typing (so it's not a lack-of-traffic issue).

I have had some Windows people here tell me it's a configuration issue with
my card's 100Mb autonegotiation, but I'm not sure.  I've even tried pinging
myself during this outage from another machine and I think (strangely enough)
it worked.

Here's my NIC's module init info on boot-up:
 3c59x.c:v0.99E 5/12/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
 eth0: 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at 0x1000, 00:50:04:0f:c9:13, IRQ 10
 8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/NWay Autonegotiation interface.
 Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.

What can I try to fix this quite annoying problem?