network card fail after MS update

[panda <panda@cs.ucsb.edu>]

Hi people,

Just wanted to bring to ur notice something I had read elsewhere. It 
seems that when security patches from MS are applied the eeprom 
registers on the network card are sometimes set. After this the card 
stops working under debian.

I encountered this problem on 2 machines. googling gave me the links 
below and I installed mii-diag ( apt-get ) and then flashed the eeprom. 
After some trial and error and one reboot the network started working on 
one of the machines.

Both the machines run debian woody stable. The etc/network/interfaces 
looks like

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth1 inet dhcp

Previously I used to get the message autonegotiation failed from 
dhclient. The driver for which it worked is natsemi ( Nat Semi D83815 ) 
and the other one is dmfe.

Here are the links
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2164
http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html

I have RH also on the box with natsemi and somehow it seems to override 
this problem. Why can't we have this on debian? sorry for the long mail 
but hope this helps some people.

thanks
panda