Well, today i borrowed a friend's wired PCMCIA NIC.  It worked
with no problems.  Returning to my 802.11 card, i run tcpdump to
see what is going on.  When i start trying to ping my router,
tcpdump starts saying things like this:

13:00:39.870457 arp who-has 192.168.254.1 tell 192.168.254.20

This is at work, where 192.168.254.1 is the router and
192.168.254.20 is the Airport (operating in bridged mode).

So i look at the output of netstat -nr again and notice (OK,
actually it was a friend who noticed) that it isn't showing the
mac address of the router like it should be.

I went ahead and unpacked etc.tgz (thanks to a floppy :) onto the
system and did some configuration, so i now do my testing in
multi-user mode.  This eliminates my suspicion that my woes were
caused by my idea of floppying base.tgz, doing some manual
configuration, and using netcat to get the rest of the sets.

I even tried booting GENERIC_LAPTOP from 1.5 and 1.5.1, but they
give the same results.

I'm really out of ideas here; it is very strange.  I'll point out
again that things must be functioning at some level, since after
specifying the correct WEP key it is able to figure out the
correct network name, whether i am at home or at work (where the
network names are different).  There is some problem at a higher
layer, though i haven't the faintest idea what might be going on.

-- 
Eric Gillespie, Jr.
mailto:epg@pretzelnet.org <*> jabber:pretzelgod@jabber.org

"This movie sure is gory!"
"Yeah, but that's one cute pig."