Well I'v got this strange problem in my hands which has occured couple of times before too. Usually getting DHCP settings takes around 10sec, but yesterday I couldn't get eth0 up at all. I was blaming everything else for whole night, but before getting to bed I left ifup eth0 run. About 20-30min later I decided to check my mail once more and checked the state of eth0, which was now up.
I tried running eht0 down and then up once more and went back to bed. According to log files it took over 50min's the second time to get interface up!

Interface is running on Realtek's 8029 card which seems to work only with NE2K-PCI module. Usually network has worked just fine with this settings. I tried also doing same with 3com 509 , which seems to have just the same problem. I'm connected to inet with Zyxel -box (provided by my ISP) and I cannot reconfigure Zyxel since it's provided as it is and it seems to work perfectly fine under Win XP (gets settings in few secs).

I'm kind of amused and confused... surely wouldn't like to reboot my server! Any great ideas?

And to bottomline I'd like to remind that same linux-settings seemed to work just fine before. I could always blame my ISP, but Win XP seems to get addresses fine, so...

- Janne Lepola