Hi,

I yesterday got a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop, which came with
3Com 3c589 PCMCIA card. After the Windows installation was
wiped, I installed NetBSD 1.6 beta on it.

I booted with 1.6B1 disks and installed 1.6B1 userland
and slightly newer kernel on the thing, over ftp, and then
rebooted.

No go, ep1 was recognized and configured and there were no
error messages, but still, ep1 just would not work at all:
no incoming traffic, no outgoing traffic. And nothing
got reported.

I spent many hours compiling kernels on my other machine
and rebooting with install disks (where network did work,
since I installed over network) to ftp the kernel to the
laptop. Nothing worked.

Finally I realised to try booting one of my kernels in
single-user, and lo and behold, network worked. After
some tweaking, it became apparent that the cause of
the network to stop working was this:

 ttyflags -a

Why, I do not know. I edited my "ttys" file (which was
the standard that got installed) and removed everything
except /dev/console and wscons (/dev/ttyE*) and rebooted.
And there it was, networking worked in multiuser. I
didn't spend more time trying to figure out what makes
networking fail in /etc/ttys, but if someone knows,
I'd like to know.

-- 
arto