dead network eth0 / ppp0

[Ian Timshel <itschaotic yahoo ca>]

Hi all.. 
I've just put in the second new main board in this box in the past two 
weeks.. groan.. hopefully the worst is over.  

I know very little about networks.

I have a number of questions but first things first.

I can't ping between the two machines and 192.168.0.2 can't ping 
anywhere.  

192.168.0.1 (weasles) is the gateway for 192.168.0.2 (clockers) for 
internet access via ppp0

I went to bring my network up and with "ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 
netmask 255.255.255.0 up" I got no complaints.  

Then I ran a script I found at Redhat with "./firewallss start" and I 
thought my masquerading with some protection was started without 
complaint. 

netstat has output that seems correct to me.
[root weasles root]# route
" Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use 
Iface
mrrsmb01bb6-ac0 *    255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 ppp0
192.168.0.0     *         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
127.0.0.0       *           255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
default   mrrsmb01bb6-ac0 0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 ppp0

I have disabled NFS and NIS for some unknown reason on the client 
machine but I don't know enough to know if this is part of the trouble 
or not.

I did not disable the onboard RJ45 connection in the bios but instead 
first tried to use the  3com 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] but neither seems 
to help.

/var/log/dmesg contains a few references to irq conflicts.  

"PCI: Found IRQ 3 for device 00:0f.1
IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.0, have irq 10, want irq 3"

then later..

"PCI: Found IRQ 3 for device 00:10.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 3 with 00:0f.1
IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.0, have irq 10, want irq 3
IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.1, have irq 10, want irq 3"


[root weasles etc]# cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain	localhost	
192.168.0.1	weasles.ripped.flesh	weasles
192.168.0.2	clockers.adhd	clockers


Any ideas would be very welcome.  
Cheers!  Ian.