I am totally stumped. I know that I have RedHat installed on my box, but I don't think this should matter too much. It is the PCMCIA stuff that is weird... not the distro. However, if you think Suse would run this with no issues then I am definately willing to switch! :-) Here is the issue: I am running an NEC Versa 5080/64mb RAM/3gb HD and I just put a fresh install of RH7.3 on it. Now here is where issues come in... I have a SMC8040TX network card which is supposed to be NE2000 compliant. So it just automagically loads the pcnet_cs.o module. The first time I inserted the card it worked wonderfully. I got a DHCP address and I could get to the net and bring up any page I wanted to. Then I made the mistake of turning my laptop off. :-/ Now when I boot up (changing no settings) the card is detected and the driver is loaded (known from hearing both beeps and doing an lsmod) but it will not transmit anything over the network. It is as if it can only listen to the traffic on the rest of the network but not participate. I can do an 'ifconfig eth0 up' and it shows up in my card listing and then do a 'tcpdump -i eth0' and it shows every single packet flowing through the network. If I try and hardwire an address to the card ('ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.5 up') then it shows the IP address but I cannot ping anything. This is very frustrating since it worked perfectly the first time. To sum up: fresh install of RH7.3 NIC works perfectly. Reboot and it becomes a silent partner on the network. Will not join in the chatter anymore... even when I uninstall PCMCIA support and put it back in. - updates to the original post - Ok here is something quite odd: tcpdump shows the arp reply from the server as: arp reply 192.168.0.5 is-at 0:e0:98:88:3a:2b while on the client it shows the correct MAC address: 0:e0:98:98:3a:3b I have tried hardwiring both with the following command in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts: module "pcnet_cs" opts "hw_addr=0x00,0xe0,0x98,0x88,0x3a,0x2b" I feel like I am getting somewhere... thing is though.. this low level stuff is a bit out of my league. I can troubleshoot it, but I have no idea how to fix it. I have also tried setting the arp table manually but it doesn't work. (Yes, I tried it on both the client and server machines) Any ideas? - Matt Bradford