NFE0 down during boot

I use an integrated NVIDIA nForce MCP77 networking adapter, but I have some problems when booting the system. When the network adapter is configured (from /etc/rc.d/netif), then the network is still down. Setting the computer's date/time fails, because it cannot resolve the NTP host and some other daemons fail as well.

When I add a sleep of 4 seconds after the network is started, then I can see that the network state becomes up and everything works fine. Is there a bug in the boot process or am I doing something wrong?
 
Add "SYNC" to the DHCP call in rc.conf:
Code:
ifconfig_nfe0="SYNCDHCP"

Startup will then wait for DHCP to issue a lease before continuing.
 
Why isn't SYNCDHCP the default? It doesn't make much sense to start network services before network interfaces have been fully configured. Or am I missing something?
 
kpa said:
Why isn't SYNCDHCP the default? It doesn't make much sense to start network services before network interfaces have been fully configured. Or am I missing something?

Some (many? most?) systems can get a lease in time to not need to wait, or have other services starting that don't care. That makes for quicker startup.

I agree that SYNCDHCP would be a safer default.
 
The SYNCDHCP fixes the problem indeed. Thanks very much, because this is much more elegant than sleeping for a while. I would also suggest to make this the default or to write a line to rc.conf how to fix this issue. I did search for a solution, but I only got one via this forum.
 
FYI: This is not a driver bug. Establishing a valid link with link partner will take time and sometimes it can take more than 10 seconds. However most start-up scripts are not prepared to handle this. Check mailing list archives for the issue and possible solutions.
 
Made a pretty standard install a couple of days ago and did run into a lot of problems with this as well. ntpd and various other daemons and startup scripts fail as they can't resolve or connect to anything. In /var/log/messages I could see that all the scripts failed and a couple of seconds (~5-10) later the computer would get an IP address. After some googling and asking around I found this thread, and SYNCDHCP, that saved me. :) The DHCP process seems to be rather slow on my net so I guess this is why I had these problems. But it would be nice with at least a note in rc.conf about DHCP/SYNCDHCP.
 
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