I've run into an odd problem, involving DHCP and two identical NICs. I've seen somewhat similar problems on the board but none exactly like it and I can't seem to figure out what's going on. I'm pretty green to SUSE and linux so please bear with me.

I'm running SUSE 9. There are two Broadcom BCM5703X gigabit cards on my server connected to a Cisco 1760 router running DHCP. All the other clients on the network (Windows PCs) receive an address correctly and can access the internet. Both cards are set for DHCP in YaST (config tool for SUSE), but eth0 will not pick up an address and eth1 will. When I ifstatus eth0 it gives me the make and model and then says
"dhcpcd running -
eth0 - no ip address assigned (DHCP)"

ifstatus for eth1 gives me all the seemingly correct address info.

Additionally sometimes I can access the internet using eth1 and sometimes I can't. I can always ping internally but on and off I lose access to the internet. When I do have access, it's extremely slow. I did try turning off IPv6 and that didn't help.

At first I thought maybe the NIC card went bad, but I've got two identical servers and they both have the same problem. So it's unlikely it's the NIC.

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Try typing as root into a terminal:
ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0
ifconfig eth0

See what that does.

When you have two or more interfaces on the same subnet you will have problems. It ends up messing up the routing tables because of ARP responses.

Some of the ways I remember to get around this are to setup policy routing, bonding the two interfaces and then load balancing them, proxy ARP, or manauly configuring the routing tables.

What you are doing now will not work as you are expecting unless you go into some more advanced configurations.

ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0
ifconfig eth0

- I tried these commands and received no errors but nothing changed afterwards: there is still no IP address assigned

As far as the 2 NICs being on the same subnet goes, I actually couldn't get an address on eth0 before eth1 was even configured. I've even disabled eth1 again and still couldn't get an address on eth0 after deleting it and reconfiguring it on its own.

Ok, I've found the problem and it has nothing to do with Linux or SuSE. Thanks for the replies and sorry about any time I've wasted.

FYI...Two PCI Ethernet Cards that are based on the same chipset will confuse the Kernel in configuration for Networking and also reporting status. Also...press the card all the way into the PCI slot on the Motherboard. The position of the Cat5 or other cabling has a lot of torque and this tends to raise the PCI Ethernet Card out of the slot. Also, if the Box containing the Motherboard is lifted, the Card is likely to raise. IMHO using cabling ties or twist ties is a time saver. Between shelves and before and after walk ways.