i've had modems die from lightening, but i've never heard of network cards getting fried threw lan cables. i reinstalled the os on one of the boxes with no luck. one of them is suse linux and the other is debian, i've never had problems with them before. the other five machines are freebsd, and i can't bring up the interfaces on any of them with ifconfig, even though the settings all appear to be correct. i guess i'll go tinker with them some more. thanks for the help!