Lateloading NIC and mobo recommendations

Happy New Year to you all!

I have two questions, and admittedly only the first is Linux specific.

1) My mythbox kept loosing it's network connection after a 4 minutes of
network use (it would work fine for short bursts, but if I played a
video from another box in the house, the network connection would freeze
after about 4 minutes, then work again about 20 minutes later). I
figured the easiest fix to try would be to just swap the NIC. I disabled
the onboard NIC and put in a basic D-Link. Now, the new card fixed the
issue, but the challenge for me was how it loaded.
    Disabling the onboard NIC meant that the new one was eth0, but it
wouldn't start at bootup, even though the network scripts try to start
and set up eth0 at boot. After the computer has booted, I can just do a
simple
        /sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.145 up
        /sbin/route add default gw 192.168.0.42
and all is well.
So instead of trying to figure out the problem, I thought I'd just force
those two lines into rc5 startup scripts, early enough so that my remote
smb mounts would set up properly. But then the command fails. Eventually
I just put those two lines, plus my smb mounts in a file and have it be
the last thing that runs in rc5.d, and then everything is peachy. But
it's a kludge. Can someone tell me why it won't work earlier?
(One final note - this is a very basic debian box, so please don't
direct me to ubuntu menus and the like - let's stick with the command
line here). Thanks.

2) I'm having a bad run with some motherboards and bad caps, in an
office where their hardware needs are minimal, except for reliability.
So we don't need dual core, and we'd like to use our DDR ram and AGP
cards, but we don't want the cheapest (money and quality) boards. Anyone
have any good advice on low spec but better quality boards to go with
these days?

Thanks as always for your help and ideas.
        Les...
Received on Tue Jan 2 11:03:12 2007