Having to reboot to get network access working...

[Eusaphious]

Ive been working on this for days now and cannot figure this out.

My network was working fine then one day I went to restart the net.eth0 service and the dhcp timed out and gave me a 169.* address. I tried a static IP address but it would not even ping my router. I tried using my secondary onboard NIC and it to would not work. Restarted the PC and all was fine again. I stopped the service and restarted and network would not come back up. This machine has two onboard NICs that use different drivers and different chipsets and both showing the same behaviour. I rebooted again to get network working and after trying updateing kernel and updateing the system even to unstable did nothing to help. I booted up into my windows partition and stopped and started the network services in there and they did just fine over and over again without needing to reboot. Frustrated I reloaded gentoo entirely and still having the same issues. IP aliasing also does not seem to work correctly. I can ping the second IP address but when you do a ifconfig (or ifconfig -a) it does not show the entry for eth0:1 but able to ping still. Other machines in my house running gentoo are doing just fine and do not have any issues at all.

The only way I can get network access right now is once it starts to leave it alone. If I stop it I must reboot for it to start working again. I wouldn't think hardware failure is the cause of this being that both NIC's that use different drivers failed in the exact same time and show the exact same symptoms, not to mention windows seems to handle stopping and starting the network services just fine.

Any ideas on what might be the issue here?

[Eusaphious]

The Gentoo live cd also does not seem to allow me to restart the network services without rebooting either.

In windows I can do a ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew just fine. I can also disable the hardware in device manager and re-enable and it is still gets the dhcp address just fine.