Hi all, Another FYI-mail (and just to verify that I'm not going insane here); I recently purchased an ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI -board with a tri-core Phenom. This is a small uATX-board with all the garnish integrated motherboards are supposed to come with, and fairly well supported in CentOS 5 and other modern distros. When I installed it (~2 months ago) the NIC was not supported; Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02) ...but Realtek provided a 2.6-kernel compatible r8168-driver; r8168-8.006.00 When the CentOS 5.2 updates were published, I saw to my happiness that the kernel-supplied r8169-driver now handled the NIC, and I had no reason to rebuild the r8168-driver to support the new kernel. Last time I rebooted, was July 2nd, to the 2.6.19-92.1.6.el5 kernel. Since then, the kernel supplied r8169-driver worked like a charm. The machine is a home file-server, serving files over NFS and SMB, and runs my torrent downloads. It also pulls CentOS updates. I would have noticed if it did not work. Today, I got around to replacing a failed disk, and after rebooting I had no network connectivity. The NIC displayed 'weird' symptoms; 10Mbps link as shown by ethtool, 100Mbps link as shown by the link-indicator on the switch, ifconfig showed no TX-packets, some RX-packets, /billions/ of dropped packets - increasing by millions every second. The kernel log showed multiple 'Link down' entries. After digging around a little, swapping switch-ports, yattayatta, I unloaded the r8169-module (rmmod) and built and loaded the Realtek-supplied r8168-module. Link up, packtes going in and out, no dropped packets, GigE link, etc etc. At this point I have no idea what actually happened. I'm thinking some weird state on the PHY of the NIC (I've seen this on the Nvidia NICs) that was not flushed due to a too short power-loss, or possibly that the r8168-driver sets some PHY-state that was not lost at the kernel-update that brought me the 'working' r8169-driver, or something similar. I'm taking suggestions, tho. Anyone else with this same board, CentOS 5.2 (x86_64) and using the r8169-driver? -S -- Simen Thoresen, Dolphin ICS Systems Administration and Wulfkit Support