SONGS

Upon further inspection, as suspected, I was connecting to the switch at 100/half. I solved this by adding the following to the linux boot image:

1. I created a ifcfg-eth0 file (my client m/c only has a single NIC) in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, and added the following entries:
DEVICE=eth0
LINESPEED=100
ETHTOOL_OPTS="speed 100 full duplex autoneg off"

note that I was intentionally redundant with line speed...no reason other than to force the issue, and device entry is probably not required either, but it didn't complain

2. Although probably not required I added /etc/modules.conf with the following entry:
alias eth0 tg3

I tested this by sending a linux wait job and then adjusting the line speed, etc. settings for the interface and reintializing the NIC each time on the client. Of course, your mileage may vary as all of this is wholly dependent on your switch configurations.