Detected Ethernet Cards Fail To Configure At Boot

[Damien Tougas]

Hello,

I am running a server with 5.3-RELEASE. I have 3 3COM 905 ethernet 
cards (xl0, xl1, and xl2). I am getting this bizarre problem where the 
cards are detected during the boot process:

xl0: <3Com 3c905-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0xb000-0xb03f irq 12 at 
device 10.0 on pci0
miibus0: <MII bus> on xl0
nsphy0: <DP83840 10/100 media interface> on miibus0
nsphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl0: Ethernet address: 00:60:97:d0:34:1d

xl1: <3Com 3c905-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0xa800-0xa83f irq 10 at 
device 11.0 on pci0
miibus1: <MII bus> on xl1
nsphy1: <DP83840 10/100 media interface> on miibus1
nsphy1:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl1: Ethernet address: 00:60:08:17:24:df

xl2: <3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0xa400-0xa47f mem 
0xe4000000-0xe400007f irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0
miibus2: <MII bus> on xl2
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus2
ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
xl2: Ethernet address: 00:04:75:8f:89:5f

but their configuration fails. I don't get any error messages, its 
almost as if they don't exist. One of the interfaces is configured to 
have DHCPD running on it, but DHCPD fails saying "xl2: not found".

I log in after boot up, and when I do an ifconfig, all the interfaces 
are there, but not configured.

To fix the problem, all I have to do is bring the machine down to 
single user mode, then back up to multi-user mode and everything gets 
configured properly.

Any ideas what may be causing this?

--
Damien Tougas