I found a bit of motivation last night and tried out all the PCI network cards
that I could find.  results are in the driver-status file I mentioned before.

to summarize:  about half of the fast ethernet cards work fine, none of the
copper gig-e cards work at all.  some of the gig-e failures look like simple
endianness bugs, so it shouldn't be hard to fix those (though there are
likely other bugs that will show up once those are fixed).

maybe I'll try the disk controllers tonight.

-Chuck