This is likely a rehash of something that has been addressed in the archives 
(and I couldn't find).  Omitting the network design in favor of general 
questions.  Let me know if more details are required.

I have a FreeBSD 5.4-Release box with an Intel PRO/1000 T desktop adapter 
(82544GC) on which I need to have three, possibly more, vlan interfaces lease 
IPs by dhclient on an ISP facing dot1q trunk.  Each vlan on the trunk is 
bridged onto an ATM PVC which terminates at a unique ISP edge router (eg. each 
vlan interface leases an IP from a disperate subnet).  The FBSD box is intended 
to replace a Cisco 4500M+ which is working fine in this configuration.

Everything works great when IP addresses are manually configured on the vlan 
interfaces, but the use of dhclient is mandatory.

This is what I'm seeing:

- dhclient's interactions with either em(4) or some part of vlan(4) is flakey 
at best.  occasionally all 3 vlan interfaces will obtain an IP, in other 
instances there is no traffic placed on the wire at all.  typically one vlan 
int will get an IP the other two will not.  i suppose this has something to do 
with em not liking promisc.

- the vlan interfaces _must_ have the same MAC as the parent (em0) otherwise 
the parent must be in promisc in order for the vlan int to recieve frames 
destined for it if a unique lladdr is applied.  this may seem obvious, but is 
there a way to alter this behaviour to allow "unicast" MAC forwarding up from 
the parent to the vlan interfaces without enabling promisc (this might be 
another request for Linux veth on FreeBSD ;)?  our ISP requires MAC 
registration in order to allocate IPs, one MAC = one IP, period.

- the PRO/1000 achieves link with the switch (Nortel 350-24T) after rc.conf is 
parsed (i think); thus after dhclient sends its first discover broadcasts for 
the vlan interfaces.  pf ends up having an aneurysm because there are no IPs 
bound to the vlan interfaces.. that's going to be hit & miss anyway since we 
have a 1/5 or so chance of actually getting an IP when the trunk is up.  i 
tested this on both trunk and access ports with and without vlan ints on a 
couple of switches... the driver is slow to report link up.

- note that spanning tree is not running on the switch since there is only one 
switching path, therefore the port should not be subject to a forwarding delay 
which would further aggravate dhclient.

- both ends of the link have been manually configured for 100Mbps fdx 
operation, no autonegotiation on any device this box interfaces with.

The real question is - should I toss these NICs and get something else?

That's pretty much it!  Incidentally, I have an identical box running OpenBSD 
3.7 and it's utterly hopeless as well, nothing is put on the wire when dhclient 
is invoked, ever.  :\


Thanks for any thoughts on this!
Lee
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