ISA NIC & crossover cable

In my (FreBSD 4.6-RELEASE) box I have two NICs. xl0 is connected to the Internet, and ep0 is connected to my w2k pro-box. ep0 uses a crossover-cable and a private IP adress-space (10.0.0.11) and so does the NIC in the w2k-box (10.0.0.10).
However, I can't reach either 10.0.0.11 from w2k, or 10.0.0.10 from fbsd.
I tried connecting xl0 to my w2k-box and it worked without any problems. So I'm guessing that either the ISA-card (ep0) is broken, or I need to add something because it is an ISA-card.

xl0 is a 3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL, and ep0 is a 3Com 3C509-TPO EtherLink III. (Both supported).

xl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
options=3<rxcsum,txcsum>
inet xxx.xxx.xxx.28 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast xxx.xxx.xxx.255
ether 00:01:02:fa:82:35
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
status: active

ep0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 10.0.0.11 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255
ether 00:60:97:72:06:8b
media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP

The only thing weird I can see is why ep0 doesn't say "status: active"?

There are 2 more possible combinations you haven't tried:

1) Configure ep0 to your external IP using straight cable
2) Exchange ep0 with the NIC in win2k box

IMHO there no longer is such thing as ISA NIC on earth. It doesn't worth to waste any time (not even 5 minutes) on cheap/unreliable cards. Can you afford to buy a pack of cigarette? Why can't you trash your ISA cards?

1) Works.
2) It's quite funny. w2k doesn't even recognize ep0, not even with appropriate drivers. I could have bet good money it would be the other way around.

But you're right, I'm throwing the ISA NIC out the window right now.. literally.
Thanks man.

Try a cheap Linksys card that uses dc driver. It's most reliable. Don't buy any DLink cards.

I get discounts on 3com-cards, so I'll most probably get another one in the 3c905-series.
By the way, what's a "dc driver"?

The device, like dc0.

Heh oh. Thanks.