I'm building a redhat 9 distribution for a bunch of machines at our local high school that boots up and then immediately connects to their terminal server (win2k). The problem I'm having is that the NICs (Accton) work fine at boot until the sysinit tries to bring up the interface (eth0). The cards then throttle down to 10Mb and hang until the ethernet cable is removed and reinserted. They then immediately throttle back up to 100Mb and the boot process continues. If I don't remove and reinsert the cable, the machine sits for a couple minutes and says it brought up the eth0 correctly but couldn't determine the IP configuration. Has any one else had similar problems (and maybe fixes too?) The software on the distro works great, but we can't have to go through and explain to each teacher that they have to unplug and reconnect their cat5 cables. I'll post more detailed information about the machines and NICs when I go there tomorrow. Any help is greatly appreciated!

-AVGuy

Is the network using dhcp?

You have the interface configured to contact a dhcp server and it's not able to find one.

That's what happens unless I unplug and reconnect the ethernet cable. If I do that everything runs smoothly. The network cards are actually Acer cards. If no one has a good fix, it's ok because we can swap out the nics for better ones (linksys, or kingston is what we have and those work fine). The issue stumped the entire IT department there so I just wanted to know if anyone else has seen something similar.

-AVGuy