Hi,

I have a Redhat 5.5 machine installed as a virtual machine in VMWare environment. I defined an ethernet card (eth0) as an E1000 card. It is detected ok by the OS. I gave it an IP address, defined it in ifcfg-eth0 and /etc/hosts, and defined a gateway. It is configured in the same way as many other virtual hosts on that machine, that works fine. The only difference I can see is that the card is defined as 1000full/autoneg on as opposed to autoneg off in other servers. It does not change to autoneg off even if I set it so explicitly.

The problem I'm facing, however, is very strange: network connectivity to the host is unstable, and only stays up for a few minutes at a time.
The really weird part is that whenever i perform a ping from the server console outside - inside network connections suddenly start to work (inward ping starts to reply, ssh connection respond etc). this goes on for a few minutes and than things stop again.

I tried to change ip address. no help. also tried defining another network interface (eth1) and working with it. no help. network guys do not seem to know what the problem is. Can anyone help me?

thanks,
jstilby

Do you have multiple links from the ESX/i host to the upstream switch ? ... are the uplinks trunked ? .. it looks like it may be a misconfiguration issue between the host and the physical switches.