lab and were never able to reproduce it.. however in the lab once we connected a network cable and enabled the 2nd nic .. the server crashed in minutes.. I have seen problems that seem related to PCI bridge config, and many multiport NICs have bridges. Have a look at your dmesg and pci config, and in particular if there is a PCI bridge that has only two NICs (or two two-function NIC chips, as in quad-port wm or bnx).
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