eth1 not coming up at boot time

Hello all. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Just wondering if anyone has had similar experiences.

I have two interfaces on my Red Hat 9 box - an Intel e100 as eth0 (static
private IP) and a 3Com 3c905 as eth1 (static Internet IP). I am running
iptables and snat to do my port forwarding / address translation. It works
great, with one exception : eth1 will not come up on its own at boot time,
or whenever I attempt to restart networking (service network restart).

If I wait until the machine is up, then issue a "ifup eth1" - it works fine.

So, I am operational, but eth1 being my Internet side... if the power goes
out and I am not at home, I won't be able to get into the box as the
external interface will be down. :-(

Any ideas? My /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 looks like this :

DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=none
BROADCAST=209.115.229.127
IPADDR=209.115.229.69
NETMASK=225.225.225.192
GATEWAY=209.115.229.65
ONBOOT=yes

The same fields and appropriate data as my eth0 which works fine...