Well... I thought I'd just do a little work on firebird (the server).
A little work... like replacing both network cards at the same time (with
Netgear FA311's).

Both cards were were giving us trouble.  The Internet side NIC locked up
every month or two, the local net one didn't want to talk on twisted-pair
(we switched from coax to twisted pair last week and have been running on
a stand-alone router temporarily).

Some time back (while trying to compile a kernel for a different machine),
I messed up my kernel configuration for firebird, but thought I'd saved a
good copy of the config.  When the kernel booted with lots of stuff
missing, I moved the old kernel over it without backing up the bootable
one.  The "good backup" turned out to be corrupt because of my
forgetfulness during the building of the previous kernel for that other
machine.  So the machine wouldn't boot.  And the CD-ROM drive wouldn't
work.  And my boot floppy was corrupted.

I finally got a boot floppy made on another machine (hooray for having the
second router already set up and working), mounted my file systems and
built a correct kernel.  This, of course, required going through a couple
docs to make sure I got all the right options set...  almost an hour to
build a working kernel.

So... she boots, the network driver recognizes both new cards, except the
network isn't working.  That was easy... I just guessed wrong when I
plugged my Internet-side network cable into a NIC.  Moved that and reset
and the Internet is fine... we're back on the net.  All told, we were off
the net for a couple hours... much longer than expected.

But the the second NIC doesn't work.  Doesn't even get any lights when I
connect it to the hub.  Turns out that the driver was turning off
auto-negotation on the second card, so it wouldn't talk to the hub on the
other ned.  Took me an hour to track down that problem, but we were on the
net during that part.  And I'm finally done with the last of the fallout
of moving the computers upstairs.

Oddly, I bet the problem with the local-side NIC I removed was the same
problem of disabled auto-negotiation... symptoms were the same.  But the
Netgear cards were only five bucks each after rebate, so no real harm
there.

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