SOLVED: iproute2 kills my network

[Se7enLC]

So I have a machine happily operating using ifconfig. I decided I wanted to switch to iproute2 instead of ifconfig. So I emerge iproute2. Configuration should be the same so I reboot.

Kernel panic trying to do network routes for vmware. Ok, that's fishy, but whatever. I remove vmware from the default runlevel and try again.

One network card (static IP configuration) gives this error:

RTNETLINK answers: No such process

Other network card (dhcp) gives no error and is able to get an IP.

Neither card can give me connectivity to the outside world. I can't even ping my router. As soon as I unmerge iproute2 and reboot, things are back to happy again. Just having iproute2 ON the system is enough to screw it up. setting modules=("ifconfig") is not enough to make iproute2 not eat my network connectivity.

Any ideas? I guess I can keep using ifconfig, but I'd like to start delving into traffic shaping, so I figure iproute2 is the first step.

[Se7enLC]

Or if nobody has an idea on how to debug this problem, can somebody suggest a resource on what the correct way to switch from ifconfig to iproute2 is?

[Se7enLC]

gentoo-sources kernel version 2.6.23-r3
iproute2 version 2.6.22.20070710
Motherboard is an Asus P5W DH Deluxe, ethernet adapters use the sky2 module

The part that gets me is the night-and-day difference between having iproute2 installed and not. with iproute2 installed, the interfaces can get an ip via dhcp, but can't ping the dhcp server that gave it to them. As soon as iproute2 is unmerged and the system rebooted, the network works fine.

[Se7enLC]

Solved -

Apparently if you just specify an IP address in /etc/conf.d/net, it will work fine with ifconfig (and set up the default broadcast and netmask), but if you install iproute2, it takes over and screws everything up. Lesson learned - always specify netmask and broadcast.