interface woes, interface is up and has an ip assigned to it, but it cannot ping out and it can't be pinged

[Bsd Neophyte]

alright, this problem is a bit weird.

i rebuilt the kernel and included the parameters for the 2 AMD NIC's in
the system.  now, ifconfig shows them to be pcn0 and pcn1.  i assigned
them their ip addresses in rc.conf.

now, for some reason, i cannot ping the interface from another system and
i cannot ping another system from the FreeBSD box through either of the
NIC's.  i can however ping the NIC's themselves from the FreeBSD box.

when i plug the cat5 cable into either jack and run "ifconfig" the status
changes from "no carrier" to "active".

what further confuses me is that there is no entry for either pcn0 or pcn1
in /dev.  when i try "sh MAKEDEV pcn0" or "sh MAKEDEV pcn1" i get the
following message:

pcn0 (or pcn1) - no such device name.

i don't know if the two are related or unrelated.  

can anyone help me out with this one? 

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