Network startup with age Ethernet device

[Lowell Gilbert]

Olivier Nicole <Olivier.Nicole at cs.ait.ac.th> writes:

> I want to set-up a small server from an Asus P5L-MX motherboard.
>
> It has an onboard gigabit Ethrnet that works with the driver age. 
>
> Problem is that at boot, I experience the interface to go up and down a
> couple of times, and it is usually down when Apache try to start, so
> Apache would not start (nor ntpd).
>
> I resolved to add a 5 seconds sleep in /etc/rc.d/netif but there may be
> a more elegant way to solve that.

Have you tried using netwait? 
I think that would involve putting enable_netwait in rc.conf, and
configuring an address for it to check; probably the gateway would be
good enough.