Burned Ethernet Card - way to check?

[vukibuki]

I am pretty sure my ethernet card is burned. Is there any way to determine that for sure?

Anyway, the story is- the lightning hit near my house. One ibook was on and connected during the storm, the other one hasn't been used in a while. After the cable people fixed the cable outlets, the modem was online but without PC activity when connected to either ibook. I got a new modem. Now the laptop that was in the closet is online, but the one I used during the storm still can't find DHCP connection. Other then that it seems to be just fine. Everyone I talked to suspects that ethernet card was fried and it'll cost me a lot of money to replace the logic card. The cheaper option is to get airport express with the airport card.

Before I decide how much money I really want to put into this G3 ibook I would really like to make sure that the ethernet card IS bad. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I am UNIX literate but not at the sys adminlevel. Are there any commands that can check the status or something like that?

Thank you!

 

[nixgeek]

I guess you can try pinging any machines on your network. Try to even ping your own IP address and see if at least that works. You could also try with another NIC. If you aren't getting any packets in and out and you know that everything is configured properly then it HAS to be bad.

Why not take out that NIC and test it on another computer. That will surely tell youif the card is bad or not, especially if it's not working on the second computer either.

EDIT:

I just saw that this was an iBook and not a desktop Mac. I'm guessing that if you know everything is configured properly, then there's not much you can do. You could try and use something that will normally view packets coming into the Ethernet port. If nothing's coming in then it's not working.