need help with configuring ethernet cards

[Michael Nielson <mcnielson@home.com>]

Hello All,

I'm in the process of resurrecting a 486 to be used as a firewall to
enable multiple machines here on my home lan to access a single cable
modem via IP masquerading.  I'm having some problems getting my ethernet
cards working so I'm hoping that you'll help me out a bit.  (I'm new to
Debian and Linux, but not new to UNIX in general.)

After doing a base install of slink 2.1.9-1999-03-03, I added two D-Link
DE-220PCT cards to the system.  I used the D-Link setup program to set
the IRQ and base addresses to unique values.

Next, I added alias entries to /etc/modutils/aliases to configure these
cards use the ne driver since my understanding is that they are
NE2000-compatible.  Upon reboot, ifconfig does indeed recognize the
cards as eth0 and eth1.  However, I'm unable to get either of the cards
to talk to other machines on the net.  I notice that after doing:

   ifconfig eth0 <ip address> netmask <netmask>

... the "netstat -rn" command does not report an entry for the card. 
This seems odd to me.  I've tried manually to establish a reasonable
"netstat -rn" entry for it by invoking various forms of the route
command, but to no avail.  In the end, I can ping the IP address for the
card itself, but I can't ping anything out on the network.

Does anyone have any suggestions?  Anyone have experience with using 
DE-220PCT NIC cards?  Or maybe since I'm new to Debian I'm just missing
something obvious when it comes to configuring new drivers on the
system.

Thanks much,

Mike Nielson
mcnielson@home.com