Blinking ethernet
We've been using DirecTV DSL for the internet at my parents' house for a few years now, back from the days when it didn't suck (I miss Rhythms) to the shutdown. During that time, I used an Apple AirPort Base Station to DHCP the one IP, and run NAT for everyone else in the house. The DSL modem didn't mind the traffic; as long as only the base station sent it packets, it was fine.
We got a cable modem as a replacement. I tried to do the same setup, but the modem isn't happy. If it sees any traffic on the network, it freaks and won't connect, and sometimes will just stop working. So I went and bought a Netgear MR-814 which is the replacement for the MR-314 that I currently use. The key is that I know that the MR-314 routes AppleTalk, which is a requirement for my parents (the laser printer is AppleTalk). I don't know if the MR-814 does, so I figured that I'd take the MR-814 and move the MR-314 to my parents'.
So I unplugged the MR-314 and dropped in the MR-814 in its place. There are a few quirks, but a few nice new features as well. (I can have my laptop get the same IP address DHCP'd to it, so I can do port routing.) There's only one problem--my Win2K machine is freaking out.
Mike's PC in the basement DHCP'd an address, and so did my PowerBook. But the status light for the port that the machine up here is connected to is flickering fast, and the PC doesn't see the network. What's up? I restarted the PC with no change. Disabling the connection doesn't change the flicker. It can still tell when I unplug the cord, though. And when I do a shutdown, the flickering stops once the "you may power off" dialog comes up.
I'm going to let it rest overnight, and if it keeps up with that, I'll try swapping in another network card. Urgh.