Erratic NIC? or maybe ISP? maybe my setup?

[jonaswidarsson]

This is a continued discussion started in a thread I hijacked.
I am in the process of installing gentoo on my new hobby server from the liveCD 2004.2.

I have two problems:
1) Onboard NIC doesn't become an eth device.
2) A PCI NIC has erratic connection to the Internet.

The server is a brand new Asus terminator T2 equipped with:
* 2GHz Celeron
* Samsung HD.
* Onboard Graphics
* Onboard 3Com 920 ethernet jack (according to lspci)
* One PCI NIC (module: 8129too) (Only one PCI slot on this mainboard.)

I intend to use the "server" as a web server and a firewall/router for the local network.

I have almost given up on the onboard NIC that won't detect properly. A bigger problem is that the other NIC won't access the internet stably.
It's very erratic. I leave the computer on and start a ping to the IP of my gateway (at the ISP side. This is an ADSL connection BTW). After while, (which can vary greatly) the packets suddenly starts coming back, and everything is OK. But then it might stop likewise suddenly after yet another while. And might come up again...
During the periods it seems very clear that everything works as normal, it is ok do go fetching stage files etc. But suddenly it hands, and no pings reach the gateway anymore.

The network that is involved outside my computers is OK as far as hardware goes, because this laptop I am using works flawlessly. If I take this very TP cable and plug it into the server makes no difference to the server's buggy behaviour.

I have access to a reserved IP, which is intended for the server, but it also works with DHCP. I didn't see any problems having another windows computer connected simultaneously (two computers directly on the internet - no firewall or router on my end). But I don't recall for sure what we tried that time, li'l bro' and I.

I see two possible sources of error here:
a) The ISP limits multiple connections in a way I haven't expected.
b) My brand new NIC is damaged.

The current state is that I am going to try if another NIC which I know for sure is working behaves better. I'll do that tomorrow night, if I remember to borrow a NIC from my job. I'll contact my ISP as well if I can reach them and ask if they DO reject multiple connections. In that case, I need to get another ethernet connection working on the server. Maybe via USB since all PCI slots would be taken.