I just bought a brand new x3250 rack from IBM. The NIC is Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet Controller. I installed CentOS 5.5 on it. The problem I'm having is that I cant get an ip on the machine via dhcp. In /var/log/messages I see e1001e NIC link is up and then e1001e NIC link is down repeatedly... it's just fluctuating up/down like its on steroids or something. I've verified that the cable works. Both ends are gigabit ethernet with auto-neg enabled. I booted from a live cd of linux mint and I see exactly the same problem there as well.. I can give the interface a static ip and ping loopback. That's it. I defined a static route but couldn't even manage to ping the gateway router on the same subnet. This is such a pain. You buy a new server and this is what you get for starters. Has anybody else had this problem? Any help would me much appreciated.
Thanks