Usually, the ethtool is your friend in these issues. Use it to view and manipulate the port-settings (speed, duplex, auto-negotiation, etc.) of any ethernet port. You may notice that in the "Port:" information it displays MII. If it displays MII, you may need to use the mii-tool to change the settings of that port, since ethtool might not be compatible.
Update: This is exactly how I fixed a LAN connection once. I had an Ethernet card that was misbehaving, and once I turned off auto-negotiation and set the speed to be 100Base-T, it worked fine. For future reference, I used the command:
/sbin/ethtool -s eth1 autoneg off speed 100Last updated on 2009-06-08 22:52:56 -0700, by Shalom Craimer
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