In recent CentOS version 6.3 is an unresolved bug, which causes the network card to freeze the server.
Following message appears in /var/log/messages
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kernel: e1000e 0000:02:00.0: eth0: Error reading PHY register
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To work around the problem you will need to turn off Active-State Power Management (ASPM)
(Feature that saves power in the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express or PCIe) subsystem by setting a lower power state for PCIe links when the devices to which they connect are not in use)
For GRUB bootloader edit the following file: /boot/grub/grub.conf and append pcie_aspm=off to the end of kernel boot line.
For example:
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kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-279.el6.x86_64 ro root=UUID=81e9e0a2-0a51-4d75-955d-909aaf848192 rd_NO_LUKS KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 crashkernel=auto rd_NO_DM rd_MD_UUID=c6855f45:016a63bb:2d79bfb2:07371ed8 rd_NO_LVM rd_MD_UUID=5d5a434e:6c20cfcd:51340c3f:29c29151 pcie_aspm=off
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To verify the change, reboot the server and run the following command:
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dmesg | grep PCIe
PCIe ASPM is disabled
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If your output is different, the change in grub.conf did not take an effect.