Comment 11 for bug 347711

I have the same problem on a Gigabyte EP35-DS3 and also an ASUS P5QL-EM motherboard with integrated RTL8111/8168B NIC. I found something interesting on this page: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260439#c8

"FYI, this bug has been around for a long time now. I've seen the same thing
happening as far back as 2.6.15, on mips based platforms. I don't have the
hardware now, but I remember that link autoneg failed randomly on r8169 and
always on the first boot. I couldn't find any fix for it, and it was generally
accepted to be a h/w bug in RTL8169.

Gregor, is it possible to use ethtool on the affected system? If this is the
same bug, forcing any mode with ethtool (100M Full/ 10M Half etc) should fail
at first, showinf 10M Half mode, and then automagically the link comes up and
there's no problem till next boot. This used to work every time on mips, for
reasons unknown."