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We've got a Compaq DL380, running RHEL 3.0 fully updated. We use runlevel 3. Although this computer has two network cards, we have are only using network card 1 (eth0). When we boot it, the computer does not pick up an IP address. However, once booted, you can successfully ifup eth0. I have tracked this down to to the following. During bootup, the network card is available until kudzu is run in rc3.d. After S05kudzu, the network card disappears! ifconfig etc. show no knowledge of its existence. After S10network, the network card cannot pick up an IP address because eth0 doesn't exist! However a few seconds after running S10network, it reappears. Thus we can then start networking manually using ifup. This behaviour is also exhibited in Fedora Core 1. It also occurs if you abandon all scripts from runlevel 3 (by choosing interactive startup, and choosing no to all options), then running kudzu by hand. Subsequent runnings of kudzu do not disable networking.
What sort of network card?
This is a stock DL380G3, which according to the HP website (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl380/index.html) has 2 NC7781 10/100/1000 NICs. Both NICs display the same behaviour as in this bug. I'll try and find out what driver this card uses.
A quick correction- before Kudzu, the network card does not exist either. Kudzu does disable it somehow though- the network light on the front of the computer goes out.
Turns out this bug has nothing to do with Kudzu whatsoever (sorry for wasting your time) Instead see bug #116586.