🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi all --
New to Red Hat (and Unix) but having fun. Trying to get two boxes on a LAN
to talk. Both are RedHat 6.2.  Both have local addr  (192.168.1.2 and
192.168.1.3)
Both can successfully ping themselves (the 192 addrs) but there seems to be
a prob w/ the interface for .2    It can't ping .3; get "network is
unreachable", and pinging from .3 to .2 get "Destination Host unreachable".

indeed, seems the .2 interface is not 'up'.  'ifconfig'  (with no params)
yields 'UP' info for localhost, and nothing for the 192 addr, and if i force
it with 'ifconfig -a' it doesn't seem to be UP:

eth0  HWAddr 00:A0:CC:63:4D:AC
    inet  bcast mask (all look good)
    BROADCAST  RUNNING  MULTICAST   (note no 'UP')

Whereas ifconfig for the .3 box yields 'UP' interfaces for both localhost
and eth0.

'route' seems ok for .3
    192.168.1.0   255.255.255.0  U  0  0  0  eth0
    127.0.0.0   ....U  0  0  0  lo

...but not so good for .2, only get the localhost (nothing for 192)

/etc/hosts file seems fine.  have put both addrs into each host file on each
machine (that is, the host files are identical).

192.168.1.2  (the funky one) has a Netgear FA 310 TX Fast Ether PCI adapter
192.168.1.3             3Com etherlink 10/100 PCI board  3C905C TX

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!
Cheers
--Felixthecat