Is rl broken?

[John J. Rushford]

Greetings,

I cvsup'd and rebuilt a FreeBSD 4.8 system last Friday after receiving the
realpath security advisory.  The machine is remote and the NIC uses the rl
driver.  After booting the machine I had no network connectivity.  The
person at the remote site says the boot was normal and he could see that the
NIC was properly configured but he could not ping it and I could not login.
We booted off kernel.old and everything came up fine.

I browsed the stable list here and noticed someone else had the same problem
with the rl driver, "rl(4) is broken in stable".  Could not see any problems
at all with the boot just the nic appears not to be working.  Its a RealTek
8139 10/100BaseTX.  I re-built the kernel again yesterday after again
cvsuping the source on Monday August 18th.

Thanks
John Rushford
jjr at alisa.org