Hello,

I am looking into an issue where roughly 75% of the time the e1000 will come up speed=1000, but every once in a while it
 doesn't. A couple differences in the syslogd are copied below. I attach output from slogger as well. While there is 
output in syslog indicating that the DHCPDISCOVER is started (and a timer setup) there didn't appear to be any packets 
leaving the interface on the client in the bad case. According to the output from slogger in the bad case, there's this 
auto negotiation value of 4 (where it is 0 in the good case). In both cases I saw output "Link Down" where in the good 
case this is followed by details of the link, but in the bad cause it fails.

Since I started seeing the differences at the autoneg phase, I could use a hand to determine what exactly was happening,
 whether the differences in the values indicated an issue with the link or whether this was an issue with the driver.

syslog bad case:
[snip]
Aug 27 02:37:30 nto dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER to wm0
Aug 27 02:38:30 nto dhclient: Could not reach a DHCP server by specified timeout. Exiting
[/snip]

syslog good case:
[snip]
Aug 27 02:27:11 nto dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER to wm0
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: DHCPOFFER from 48:5b:39:8a:6:c
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: DHCPREQUEST to wm0
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: DHCPACK from 48:5b:39:8a:6:c
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: wm0: Starting ARP probe for 192.168.0.2
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: wm0: sending ARP probe (1 of 3), next in 1.900492 seconds
Aug 27 02:27:15 nto dhclient: wm0: ARP packet received, try read it...
Aug 27 02:27:17 nto dhclient: wm0: handle_arp_packet: timeout waiting for ARP packet
Aug 27 02:27:17 nto dhclient: wm0: sending ARP probe (2 of 3), next in 1.106864 seconds
Aug 27 02:27:17 nto dhclient: wm0: ARP packet received, try read it...
Aug 27 02:27:18 nto dhclient: wm0: handle_arp_packet: timeout waiting for ARP packet
Aug 27 02:27:18 nto dhclient: wm0: sending ARP probe (3 of 3), next in 2.000000 seconds
Aug 27 02:27:18 nto dhclient: wm0: ARP packet received, try read it...
Aug 27 02:27:20 nto dhclient: wm0: handle_arp_packet: timeout waiting for ARP packet
Aug 27 02:27:20 nto dhclient: wm0: ARP found no conflict of 192.168.0.2 (timeout after 3 probes)
[/snip]

Thanks,

Gervais