Well, Arch is not that good for a server because of this reason. I love it as a developer for a desktop system, but for server I'd definitely use Debian.
How is this Arch's fault? The user did the same thing he/she normally does on Linode. This is a case where the Linode ops really understand Arch and everything just works (the 'linux' package isn't installed on the image) but the provide the latest kernels. On DO I also originally ran into this issue but support never gave a clear reason as to why, from digging around it appears to be with the 8139cp/too kernel modules (they don't load). It seems like some kind of version issue but I haven't had the time to play around with this more.
