Intermittent loss of network connection problem with Lucid

[Graham Watkins]

Good day all,

I've been running Lucid for about a week now and am mostly happy with 
its performance. There are a couple of minor niggles that I wonder if 
anyone here can advise me on.

1.    The network connection occasionally goes down.  This generally 
happens after a reboot.  It is fixable by shutting down the computer and 
switching off the modem for a minute or so and then restarting.  I would 
have suspected my modem but for the fact that it has only started 
happening since I installed 10.4 last Saturday.

when the connection is active, ifconfig shows:
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1e:8c:0d:79:43
           inet addr:82.4.159.236  Bcast:82.4.159.255  Mask:255.255.252.0
           inet6 addr: fe80::21e:8cff:fe0d:7943/64 Scope:Link
           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:1419 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:1470 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
           RX bytes:1090211 (1.0 MB)  TX bytes:271931 (271.9 KB)
           Interrupt:20 Base address:0x6000

when the connection is not working I get:
graham at graham-desktop:~$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:00:00:79:43
           UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
           RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
           Interrupt:20 Base address:0x8000


It would seem that eth0 is a non-existent connection and it doesn't take 
a computer genius to see that the problem lies here somewhere. Any 
suggestions?

Cheers

Graham