Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

Symptom:
When using a 3Com network interface card, the device (i.e eth0) fails during startup when using DHCP to obtain an IP address automatically. It also fails to start when attempting to run ifup or service network restart.

Solution:
There is problem can be found in Bugzilla 102685. The issue is with kudzu, a tool which detects and configures new and/or changed hardware on a system. Kudzu uses the ethtool command to initialize the network interface. When it does this, the 3c59x driver places the wrong values into some internal buffers of the hardware, causing the card to fail during initialization.

This can be resolved by disabling kudzu. You can do this with the command:

# chkconfig kudzu off

After rebooting, kudzu will not load and the network interface should start successfully. Please note that if you ever add or remove hardware from the system, you will need to enable kudzu with the following command:

# chkconfig kudzu on

According to the Bugzilla article, this problem has been fixed in the 3c59x driver and will appear in future releases of the Enterprise Linux kernel, beginning with version 2.4.21-20.12.EL.