Guys
OK so I decided to get more 'puters, which meant I wanted (not needed) more than 5 rj45s in my hub, so I thought "Great, lets get an 8 port SWITCH off ebay, 100base network here we come, lovely 8 port autosense etc".
Here I am now with a little problem.
My NIC's don't work with the switch. Or they do for a few minutes, then they stop. My windoze laptop dongle shows a 100M connection, but can't even ping.So I get cleverer and do a crossover cable, much fiddling later, it works, and the NIC's talk to each other, dongle shows 100M again.
Now the point of all this twisty (cable) and switchy (kingston KNS800/WG) and niccy (FA311x2 & FA410 pcmcia & 2 sun lance 10M) is to ask.
What am I doing wrong? Do I have to do something different for a switch to work?
I don't want to have a broken switch, it was brand new still in packaging, so shouldn't be DOA, the ebay guy is a legit trader, so I may get some £ back, but who knows.
Anyone have any ideas??

Jim

I know this is going to sound silly, but is the machine plugged into the uplink port?
If so, make sure the port isn't set for uplink, or it'll be looking for a crossover cable.

DMR
Definitely not. From reading up on switches, looks like they use mac addresses to route traffic, so maybe its something like that. Just need to figure out what the macs of the cards are, webmin does it, so there must be a command that does it. Logs show cards negotiate FD, so maybe the switch is defective.
Jim