NIC won't DHCP or configure

[Andrew Robinson]

Hello FreeBSD community,

I'm trying to get my network card working under 5.3 Release.  It won't DHCP.  Configuring it using ifconfig doesn't permit any connection. 

(I also tried the February Stable, with no change as far as I can tell).

WinXP identifies the NIC as Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC.  Knoppix and WinXP both provide drivers that seem to work.  Knoppix autodetects it without any (seeming) problem.

My FreeBSD kernel is generic, and both the following lines are uncommented:

device          miibus     # MII bus support
device          re         # RealTek 8139C+/8169/8169S/8110S


The output from ifconfig is: 

fwe0: flags=108802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=8<VLAN_MTU>
	ether 02:90:f5:40:24:d8
	ch 1 dma -1
plip0: flags=108810<POINTOPOINT,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
	inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
	inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
	inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3 


and what I think is the relevant part of dmesg is:

firewire0: <IEEE1394(FireWire) bus> on fwohci0
fwe0: <Ethernet over FireWire> on firewire0
if_fwe0: Fake Ethernet address: 02:90:f5:40:24:d8
fwe0: Ethernet address: 02:90:f5:40:24:d8
fwe0: if_start running deferred for Giant


It makes me wonder if FreeBSD is identifying the card as something different than it is.  Is that possible?  What next steps might be useful for me to take?

Thanks much!

Andrew