Description of problem: After doing a network install and rebooting, the network card stops functioning. The card is identified as a 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE] with no IRQ or I/O in redhat-config-network. Running ifconfig shows IRQ 10 and I/O 0x10e0. Trying to restart network services gives this error message: Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: It happened both times I installed. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install severn 2. Reboot after installation is completed Actual results: Network card fails to function Expected results: Network card functions normally Additional info: This is happening in a virtual machine using VMware. I have several virtual machines with several different OSes, and this is the only VM I've had a network problem with. BTW, I've tried using rmmod and modprobe to reload the driver. Same results. I've tried adding the IRQ and I/O in the redhat-config-network dialog, and that makes it worse, since I got error messages about not being able to load the module because of incorrect parameters. I also tried removing the network card section from /etc/sysconfig/hwconf just to see if the card gets rediscovered upon reboot. Kudzu didn't discover it but the module was loaded anyway with the same symptoms as before.
vmware's network driver is buggy in respect to link status.
I'm surprised that you closed this so rapidly. I've installed various other releases of Red Hat and other Linux distributions in VMWare virtual machines without any problems. From what I've seen the network driver only fails in severn. Aren't you even planning to look into this?
Well, there's my usual "please try booting with acpi=off" but I doubt it applies here. We do not regularly test vmware installs that I'm aware of and we don't list it as a supported platform, though we don't intentionally make it non-functional either... If the real hardware works (and I don't think I've seen bug reports for pcnet32 on real hardware, and we know it is rather a popular piece of hardware) it's hard to consider this a kernel bug.