All I know is my wife left one of our network computers on after she turned off the speakers (it's for streaming NPR b/c our local affiliate sucks) and later that day there was a lightning strike that made a number of electronics in the house blip off then back on.

Now the stream no longer comes on, and I cannot ssh to it, regardless of what possibility I try from 192.168.1.101-10 (never has gone higher than 103 in the past).

I hooked up the machine to my display in the other room, and the only thing that seems to be non-functioning now is the NIC, but I don't know really what the problem is, I can only guess it had to do with the lightning strike.

Yes, I got very lucky.

But can anyone suggest what commands, or what I should look for in dmesg, that I should use to test whether the NIC is really toast?

It runs Debian 4, I think (certain it's Debian, just not absolute about version)

Help?

Start from

#su
<root passwd>
#lspci -vvv
#lshw > efg.txt
#ifconfig -a
#dmidecode -t 10
Post output of relevant parts

Thanks, I'll try that when I get home from work.

Might also try:

Thanks anyway; my wife bought me a new NIC and it only cost about $20, so it was easily fixed. Sorry to bug you.