Was running 6.4 on my internet gateway/firewall machine and all was well with the linux landscape. Then i spotted a jewel which i coveted. That jewel was VPN connectivity from any client to an external Microsoft VPN server. Wanted it, craved it!! So i purchased SuSE 7.2 and decided to install it this weekend. This should be quick, i thought. Tried installing via Yast2 twice and got a 'LIL-' problem. Thought, 'Oh Boy'!! But i remembered the 'old days' of yast (Ol' faithful) and behold it worked...and all was well. Now to setup my network. Let's start with the internal network first. Card is in the machine. Ran 'pnpdump -c > isapnp.conf'. Got the card settings, matched with the MAC Address. Enabled the card by running 'isapnp isapnpconf' and behold the card was indeed enabled. Woohoo!! My joy was found (Haagen Dazs www.pathtojoy.org advert anyone?) tried pinging the card - 192.168.50.1 - and behold all was truly well. Fired up a windoze machine on the same internal network - 192.168.50.3 - and tried pinging the linux machine but no joy. The linux also could not ping the windoze machine. Looked at the cards and found the 'link' light was not flashing. My joy was rapidly dissipating at this point. Since the network had been working with 6.4, i knew the cable and the cards were fine. However, maybe the 'light led' had died so i rebooted the machine while watching the card. When the machine restarts, it'll do a check on all the hardware before the OS get's it's paws on it. behold, the led did indeed flash. Looked in the 'var/log/messages' file and i began to weep inconsolably when i saw the ff messages repeated again and again. kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 0 kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 1 kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 2 kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 3 kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 4 kernel: Hw. address read/write mishap 5 kernel: eth0: trigger_send() called with the transmitter busy. kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out kernel: eth0: Tx timed out, excess collisions. TSR=0xff, ISR=0xff, t=117 I am now at a loss as to what to do. Can anybody restore my joy?

Clifford Okoro