Integrated 3C905B in a Dell Optiplex and 100Mbps operation problem

[Narendra Sankar]

I have a Dell Optiplex GX1p PIII-450 which came preinstalled with Redhat
6.0. This has a 3C905B built into the motherboard. I am connecting the
system to a 10/100 autosensing hub. (This is a Hawking 8 port) When I do
this and try to boot the
system, it basically hangs trying to talk to the network. The network
card seems to come up ok, as I boot in single user mode and bring up
eth0 and I can run mii-diag and it tells me that I have a link beat and
that my link partner advertised 40a1. Vortex-diag says that the MAC is
set to half-duplex and transciever is set to auto-negotiate. But when I
boot to multi-user mode and start NIS and NFS, they just time out and
hang. The system seems to work when I connect to a 10 base hub. I also
tried to connect to a Cisco 100 base switch, and the system hangs
similarly.
If I disable to onboard controller and plug in a PCI
3Com 905 card, the system work great with the exact same software
configuration at both 10 and 100. Has anyone any idea on what the
problem could be
 or how I might probe this. Both Dell and Linuxcare basically
couln't solve it, with one blaming the other. i.e. Dell says it is a
software problem. I have tried two different machines exactly
configured, with the same result, so I am guessing it is a software
problem somewhere. But these systems came preconfigured and the only
changes made were in upgrading the kernel to 2.2.5-22 from Redhat.

I would appreciate any help as we are planning to move our entire
network to a 100 based switched one, which may imply all my Dells stop
working.

Thanks
Narendra Sankar