Bob,

>Then hang at this point.  Any ideas why interfaces
>don't become active even thought it appears to
>initialize?
Just out of interest, what NICs are you using?  I've located
particularly odd behaviour with the dual-port Compaq NICs I've got.

My LAN is on the on-board NIC (and I don't have a problem with that) and
I have two dual-port Compaq NICs for the other networks.  I have one
machine on OPT1 with a cross-over cable and a 'foreign', visiting
machine on OPT2.  When the machine on OPT1 or OPT2 is off for any length
of time and then comes back, everything looks normal - both ends have
links lights but no traffic gets through.  The machine on OPT2 cannot
get a DHCP address.

The only way I discovered to resolve this was to access the hidden page
status.php.  I further tracked this down to it actually running
'ifconfig -a'.  After doing that, the port effectively comes alive and
traffic starts flowing.

It would seem to be a bug in the network driver.

I think this problem also affects my WAN interface but I've never been
in a position to test it, although on the odd occasion I've had to
restart I usually have problems.

When I manage to find some nice, quiet fans for my 3Com switch, I'll be
go down to one interface and VLANs so hopefully won't suffer from this.

HTH,


                                Neil.

-- 
Neil A. Hillard                E-Mail:   neil at dana dot org dot uk
                               Web:      http://www.dana.org.uk/