On 02/14/2008 05:49 PM, Dan Martin wrote:
Could a NIC 'partly' fail so that it can't accept an address by DHCP and will fail with some connections but not others?
Our experience has been that NICs can fail almost as frequently as hard drives (particularly older ones seem to burn themselves out or something). They can also fail in unexpected ways. We had one that did the opposite of what you describe: it got its settings by DHCP (though not without a lot of haggling back and forth), but then wouldn't work consistently enough to allow a TCP connection to anything. Probably an extremely high error/retry rate.
Anyway, if you suspect the NIC, it's usually a fairly quick and easy fix to install a new one and see if that clears up the problem.