Hardware, hardware, everywhere, but not a driver to link

I've been a computer hobbyist for close to 15 years.  It started with finding a TigerDirect catalog at work, and piecing together how the components of a pc100 system worked by looking at the pictures.  I had friends in the industry, or that were hobbyists, and they filled in the blanks for me.

I became roommates with one of those hobbyist friends, and we were commited to living a nerd lifestyle.  We eschewed cable television, but joined the beta program to test one of the first broadband cable internet services in the country.  Combined with the fledgling P2P file sharing industry, any piece of software we wanted was at our fingertips.

We setup a peer to peer network in our home, with a file server holding all of these illicit files.  I even setup an FTP server, to exchange those files with friends accross town.

Those friends connected us to network admins who were upgrading machines in some local school district.  Instead of scrapping thoses machines, we picked them up and turned 20 broken Windows boxes into a five machine Apache Linux server farm.  (In all fairness, my roommate configured most of the Linux machines, I just reassembled them into working boxes.)

I stopped paying attention to computers when DDR became the standard.  My mind was occupied with other things, but the knowledge I had never left me.  I was able to keep up with about 80 % of any tech conversation.

Flash forward about 10 years and I'm here, installing a network card into a machine that's about as old as the kids around me.  Thats the test.  Install a network card.  They even have every driver, for every piece of hardware in the Computer Tech department on the Novell file server.

But I can't access the network.

Here is a task I've performed hundreds of times, but I've always had a working machine to find drivers with. I'm not going to get into the technical details here, but the short story is, I'm still not sure what I did wrong.  I got a 70 because the network card was physically installed in the machine, but I'm still trying to figure out the issue with my network access.  I could ask the professor, but if I don't figure this one out, the lesson won't stick.

Here's where education comes in.  Sure, I've literally done this exact task 100's of times, but I've always done it for my own ends.  I need to do this for my professor, so that I can prove that I can do it for an employer.  And setting up those networks and servers?  Completely for myself.  I need to know this stuff inside and out, so that I can do the same for anyone.

I suppose that is the advantage of being a 35 year old freshman.