Strange tcp/ip failure setting up firewall

["Michael R. Jinks" <mrjinks wwa com>]

I'm trying to make a firewall from scratch on an old Compaq 486, and I'm
confused about some programs that aren't showing up somewhere along the
way.  Install seems to go fine (via NFS mounting the RedHat cd on
another Linux box) but I'm missing all of my tcp/ip-related binaries. 
ping, ifconfig, ftp and company are all nowhere to be found.  I did an
rpm -qf for those files on my working Linux machine, but rpm says that
no package owns them, so they should be part of the main install,
right?  Any idea why they wouldn't be showing up?

Possibly related:  I can rebuild the kernel using make config (and then
make zdisk successfully makes a bootable floppy), but make menuconfig
terminates with a missing file error.  When I tell it to make modules it
doesn't complain, but make modules_install returns:

ls: *.o: no such file or directory

and then exits.  I don't have Xwindows installed on this machine so
xconfig is out of the question.  Is there a bundle of files somewhere
that needs to be installed in addition to the kernel-source and
kernel-headers rpm's before I can build a modularized kernal with full
tcp/ip support?