I have a Realtek 8139 interface in one of my machines and it will not connect to the network. /etc/rc.conf contains ifconfig_rl0="DHCP" and "rl0" was obtained from a dmesg. A network interface restart yields the following:
# /etc/rc.d/netif restart
Stopping network: lo0 rl0 fwe0 plip0.
rl0: no link .............. giving up
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
rl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
options=8<VLAN_MTU>
ether 00:50:fc:6e:0f:5b
media: Ethernet autoselect (none)
status: no carrier
I have also tried "ifconfig_rl0 up", but without any effect. Anybody know what else to test and configure?
I have had similiar issues with a wireless card being intermittent on a laptop (Note: The laptop is often restarted and certain scripts are run by default). On my end initially--and by the way, it's not 100% resolved--is that the default settings of the Operating System/Window Manager are to enable control of the networking settings through 2 different application utilities--which you can choose from, and are each not compatible with the way they manage the settings)
Switching between these applications would result in some of the settings being overwritten, most likely because each was reading certain configuration files (maybe some of the same) and overwriting them to suit the way they worked.
At this point, I am looking in the /udev functioning and maybe the driver modules that are loaded....
But anyway, it always seems to be hard to track down driver issues
I do have another card that works wirelessly, but I want to try and fix it. If I do, i'll be sure to post what I find.