Well, I finally got the box to network. As god as my witness, I have no idea why this worked, but it worked: I swapped the NetGear card out of the box, replaced it with the LinkSys card, and tried one more time.
Funny, it works now. I'm still scratching my head wondering why it didn't work the last time, with the same board, same kernel, same BIOS config, same cabling, same ifconfig setup, same... but I'm glad it works (for now...). Thanks for all the help, yall! -- Bob Galloway print STDOUT q Just another Perl hacker, unless $spring. -- Larry Wall