HELP! Ethernet - hardware problem?

[saltzberg]

Well,
My internet was working fine, but I'm at this corporate hotel with a fax machine, and I needed a printer. The machine had an ethernet port in the back, and I figured it wouldn't work to connect the two directly, but I thought what the frig. After I did that though, I plugged the cable back into the ethernet port, and lo and behold, it says the cable isn't plugged in. I did all sorts of things, re-installed 10.3.9 update, zapped PRAM, purged all the caches, etc. The only thing that's changed, is that "Built In Ethernet" isn't even listed anymore in network status! System profiler still shows the port as en0, but seems it's not recognizable anywhere else. I tried the hardware diagnostic CD, and it says everything's Kosher. I've got 15 days left before my warranty runs out. Do any of you have any ideas?

By the way, my airport connection works fine, but I don't have a wireless connection at my place.
Thanks for any info you can give.

 

[simie]

Most devices that have ethernet ports need an IP address and need to be configured - it should work with a cat 5 cross over cable. Check and see if you can manually give it a static IP.

In Network in Preferences, you should see from the top of the box
Location : Automatic
Show (lists the port like modem) modem

If you click on the arrow, at the bottom of the list is new port configuration try adding the port back again, if this option is available to you in Panther.

You could try deleting the preferences.plist file and see if the port returns. The file is in the Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.