Soren:

Thanks for the information.

Your reply:

1) Made me change my Rhat -> NetBSD instructions
2) Makes me glad that several people have volunteered to review them!  :)

In my haste to be helpful, I answered a different question than the one 
that was asked.  The question I answered was: "How do you determine an 
uninitialized NIC's address (and assigned name)?"

The reason for the "dmesg | grep" business in my reply originated in my 
attempt to determine the NetBSD-assigned interface names.  Rhat's naming 
system is unrelated to chipset, but is sequential (eth0, eth1, eth2, 
etc).  It was a shock to find no "eth0", and my first thought was that my 
NICs had not been seen.  It was interesting to discover that NetBSD's 
NICnames seemed to be tied to the chipset.  I'm thinking that other Rhat 
users will be thrown by that one as well.

Unfortunately, I *assumed* that an ifconfig would not report NICs that did 
not have /etc/ifconfig.xxx files created for them.  I didn't understand, 
though it seems silly to say it, that the boot messages were showing driver 
attachments (thanks Mr. Schabert) and that if a driver was attached to a 
NIC, it would be displayed by an ifconfig.  I was thinking of ifconfig as 
reporting on "NICs with network addresses assigned", but now understand 
that ifconfig reports "NICs with drivers attached" regardless of their 
network address assignment status.

I'm going to recommend ifconfig -a instead (thanks Mr. Shannon, et al), but 
will probably mention the "grep /var/run/dmesg.boot" command you pointed 
out just as an interesting fact.

PS: Thanks for the 'awk' lesson!  :)