Intel NICs, Cisco, autoneg, and borken-ness

[Michael ODonnell]

>> 2 weeks ago, I'm certain I had this interface configured *and*
>> working just fine.
>
>Nevertheless, if it were me I'd connect the cable in question
>to some other known working system as a basic sanity test...

I was going to add that I mentioned that because I've recently
been victimized by an Extreme switch that negotiated link just
fine at the PHY level but was still hosed internally.  This was
a particularly nasty failure mode because the connected NIC on
the client machine was part of a bonded team and the expected
fault-tolerance was not obtained (ie.  it failed to failover)
because it was configured for MII monitoring instead of ARP
monitoring, and everything was working just fine, at least
as far as the MII stuff was concerned.                       >-/