Re: [gentoo-user] Strange network behaviour: NIC goes down, DHCP lease renewal fails (WORKED AROUND)

[Daniel Frey <djqfrey@gmail.com>]

On 03/06/2015 11:57 AM, Marc Joliet wrote:
>> I wasn't aware you had e1000e hardware - those are about as reliable as
>> they come. I've used many of them and never had the slightest trouble at
>> all. By all means study up on firmware and driver options - if you don;t
>> know much about that area it's very illuminating to find out more. But
>> based on experience I'd say the chances of finding an oddity with e1000e
>> are slim, and I'd be looking at a misconfigured switch.
> 
> That's pretty much what the sysadmin said, too, when I asked what he thought
> of the "power management issue" idea.
> 
>> There are some strange switches out there that let you make crazy
>> configuration, like eg blanket drop all broadcast traffic on one or more
>> ports. That's where I'd be looking first.
> 
> Yeah, that agrees with my instinct that it's most something to do with the
> switch.
> 

Is the dhcp server virtualized using vmware? I've come across a very
strange issue where ESXi's e1000e driver is very buggy and caused random
disconnects to the virtual machine. This is strictly server side,
however, nothing to do with the client and/or switch.

I suspect that you probably aren't using ESXi, but figured I'd mention
it anyway. This happened (in my experience) with both Windows and Linux
guests on ESXi, and the only way to get around it was to use some other
driver for the virtual machines (like VMWare's vmnet3 driver.)

Dan