Here's something weird. I have a dual nic setup here at home, and I rebooted, but couldn't get the net back up. While looking at dmesg, I saw that the nics were switched. eth0 was my 3com card, but read as a linksys. eth1 was my linksys card, but read as a 3com.
So I swapped the cables, and carried on, but I wonder what caused that.