Okay, I’m pretty to new to Linux and have searched around for more information on this problem, but alas, couldn’t find a solution. Hopefully you guys can help me out. Here’s my problem…

Just successfully installed RedHat 9 without any problems. Now, when I configure my Realtek NIC (as NE2000), activate it and restart the network service, I can access my network no problem – everything working okay. Well, not exactly! Now every time I now restart the system, I receive 100% packet loss at ‘Bringing up eth0 interface' and ‘Failed’. Now the Xserver won’t start! Weird thing is (well, maybe not so weird to more experienced Linux users), when I initiate an interactive startup, I disable ‘eth0’ and the system successfully boots again in Xserver! I’m using DHCP to assign IP addresses across the network.

Any input would be most appreciated.

I've had similar problems to this and they've always seemed to stem from the DHCP service. Try assigning your PC a static IP address and see if this solves the problem. In addition, another problem may be the name resolution. Try adding your hostname into the /etc/hosts. Linux seems to gernally like to do things by name first and sometimes things time out. The problem here may be that it tries to look up it's own name in the DNS server specified by the DHCP scope, and if it's not there, it errs.

Hope this helps.