network problems on inspiron 8000

[Luke Shulenburger <sluke@mit.edu>]

Hello,
I've been running unstable on my laptop for about a month now and just
recently when I booted up I can't get anything on the network.  Whenever
I try to ping localhost (or any other host for that matter) I get:

ping: sendto: Network is unreachable

I don't have a clue what's going on.  I have a Xircom PC network card
that has been previously working quite well for me using a pcmcia-cs
that I've compiled from source to work with my 2.2.17 kernel.  I've
tried looking at the logs and nothing seems particularly out of place
except these messages during bootup (excerpted from syslog)

eth0: Xircom Cardbus Adapter (DEC 21143 compatable mode rev 3 at 0x200,
00:10:A4:0F:D4:54, IRQ 9

eth0: MII transceiver #0 config 3100 status 7809 advertising 01e1

cardmgr[548]:" executing: './network start eth0'
cardmgr[548]: + eth0: unknown interface: Bad file descriptor

cardmgr[548]: + SIOCSIFADDR: Bad file descriptor
cardmgr[548]: + eth0: unknown interface: Bad file descriptor
cardmgr[548]: + SIOCSIFNETMASK: Bad file descriptor
cardmgr[548]: + SIOCSIFBRDADDR: Bad file descriptor
cardmgr[548]: + eth0: unknown interface: Bad file descriptor
kernel: neighbor table overflow
last message repeated 3 times
cardmgr[548]: + SIOCADDRT: No such device
cardmgr[548]: + SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable

Does anybody have any ideas?  I don't quite know where to begin, I can't
think of anything that changed from one reboot to the next.  Your help
would be greatly appreciated.

Luke Shulenburger
(sluke@mit.edu)