[Techtalk] ethernet card problem

[Maria McKinley]

Greetings,

I was having intermittent problems with the onboard NIC of my file 
server. People would complain about the network being very slow, and I 
would see something like this in the logs:

Mar  5 11:31:55 billie kernel: [548810.816011] NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth1: 
transmit timed out
Mar  5 11:31:55 billie kernel: [548810.836475] r8169: eth1: link up

So, I installed an Intel PWLA8391GT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI PRO/1000 GT 
Desktop Adapter 1 x RJ45 - OEM, and started using it instead. So, now 
occasionally when things get busy, the NIC just fails. I get no messages 
in the logs at all, and I have to log in to the machine locally, and 
restart networking, and then it seems to recover fine. The motherboard 
isn't terribly old, but I'm thinking that is what the problem must be. 
But, I really don't want to swap out the motherboard, so hoping someone 
will tell me something different to try. And any ideas why there are no 
log messages?

thanks,
maria