From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.3)
Gecko/20050104 Red Hat/1.4.3-3.0.7

Description of problem:
When mii-tool is correctly able to determine the link status of an
interface, all is well: when the link is ok, dhclient is started, when
link is not ok, [failed] is shown. However, when mii-tool is not able
to determine the link status (because either mii-tool does not support
the network adapter, or because the network adapter does not support
this), the scripts automatically assume that there's no link and will
not start dhclient.

This is particularly annoying for me because the emulated ethernet
adapter in VMWare (when running RHEL3 as guest OS) has not implemented
link state checking functionality (link is always on, after all).

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
initscripts-7.31.18.EL-1

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install RHEL3 under VMWare with DHCP
2. Reboot
3.
    

Actual Results:  Does not get an IP address, does not start dhclient

Expected Results:  Should get an IP address

Additional info:

Simple fix, but a little more scripting might be required for
production use:

File /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/network-functions: Line 237-238
now reads:

  echo $output | LC_ALL=C grep -q "link ok" && return 1
  echo $output | LC_ALL=C grep -q "no link" && return 0 || return 2

Change this to:

  echo $output | LC_ALL=C grep -q "link ok" && return 1
  echo $output | LC_ALL=C grep -q "no link" && return 0 || return 1

and all is well.