Over the last few days I reconfigured my server to get around the bottleneck caused by the Promise SATA controller and 3com 3c905c ethernet fighting for the PCI bus.
One note on the Promise controller - the onboard rom bios does strange things to the motherboard's drive order. The only solution I came up with is to remove the Promise board before installing Linux or anything else.
This time I installed Fedora and then all the updates before getting down to configuring the system. About 770 MB of updates..... Time for a respin?
WIth an up to date system I noticed that network setup for two networks is still broken. I had to disable neteork-manager, enable network, set the GUI profiles, and then fix the /etc/sysconf/network-scripts files by hand just as before.