I have two machines both based on the Gigabyte 7N-400-Pro2 motherboard with onboard Realtek 8169 ethernet chips. One runs as a fileserver and the other as my desktop. Both systems run Mandrake 10 (2.6.3 kernel) with custom kernel builds.

Both machines exhibit the following symptoms intermittantly on boot up.

About one in three times on booting the system appears to hang when starting eth0. it will eventually continue past this point after giving a [FAILED] startup notification but there will be no network access (which sort of completely stuffs the use of the file server). If I CTL/ALT/DEL and reboot while during this startup it will likely succeed the second time. Once up, the network is perfectly stable.

I was wondering (rather randomly) if the auto-negotiation was failing with the Gigabyte switch that both are connected to so I tried inserting the r8169 module with the parameters media = 0x10 to force 1Gb connection but my syntax must be wrong cause it just throws it out. Any help appreciated.
D.

The r8169 driver handling of link settings has been changed a bit since 2.6.3 and ethtool
is supported. I'd strongly suggest upgrading your kernel. If you are stick with a kernel
issued by Mdk, you can try upgrading the r8169 driver alone to:
http://www.fr.zoreil.com/people/fran...9.c-test.patch

Is there a correlation between the issue and a sudden reboot or a reboot after a crash ?

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Ueimor