From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031017 Firebird/0.7 Description of problem: Some network drivers can't tell if network cable is connected, when such card/driver is used, initscripts assume "link is down" and don't bring interface up. This bug has hit particulary hard on users using HomePNA (1Mbit/s ethernet over phonelines) style broadband connections and DHCP. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-7.42-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora Core 1 2. Try to connect to network using HomePNA 3. Actual Results: Computer nevers attempts to discover IP using DHCP, instead error message " failed; no link present. Check cable?" is shown. Expected Results: Networking works fine after commenting out check_link_down check on lines 274-278 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup. Additional info: Most HomePNA PCI cards seem to use AMD pcnet32 driver. It might be driver issue or maybe it is impossible to detect link beat on such media. Something (mii-tool or ethtool) prints some messages during network start indicating network link existence cannot be detected on this interface/hardware. In that case it should be assumed that cable is connected and continue as usual.
It's a driver/physical issue. The driver claims that the link is down; if it just said that the operation wasn't supported, we wouldn't assume that it is down.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/