help on configuring ether card (fwd)

["Miguel A. Avillez" <mavillez@fis.ce.uevora.pt>]

Hi all

I am trying to configure an ethernet card 3Com09 in a linux machine.
I already set up the IP adress and so on... during boot I got the 
following error messages:

SIOCSIFADDR: no such device
SIOCSIFNETMASK: no such device
SIOCSIFBRDADDR: no such device
route: netmask doesn't match route adress

could anyone tell me what does this means? 

thanks in advance

miguel