if the ethernet address is broken you can try to see if the nic is still usable by setting promiscuous mode on...
I had the a problem years ago with andrey's sis900 driver (the one in the distribution didn't work with my nic), when I changed from a terminal to a 9pcf kernel it stopped working! somehow it wasn't getting the eaddr right, after some debugging I noticed that the distribution driver worked, but only when snoopy was running... I'm a network ignorant and I was even more ignorant then, so I didn't notice that snoopy reported 0xFFFFFFF or something for address and it worked because snoopy turns promiscuous mode on. so I checked the lunixes driver and found out how to write the ether address correctly to the device and got it working, but ironically a day later geoff pushed his version of the driver for kenfs which was a merge of andrey's and charles' driver... -- Federico G. Benavento
