How low can we go?

After restoring the backup the portable will not go on the network with the ethernet connection. The wifi works. Ethernet not. Note that the broken portable was fixed by replacing the motherboard.
Now can anyone tell me why I spend hours fixing this problem?
Hint: I use MAC address filtering.
Hint: the ethernet interface is on the motherboard.
Sigh.

news.individual.net not free anymore

thunderbird thought the message was spam, I thought it was a phissing attack but in the end it turns out to be true. news.individual.net will stop being free. I think I only use it to read comp.lang.lisp nowedays, but I should check my leafnode setup. The major part of my news comes from gmane.org and private servers.
I don't know if it is good or bad. Good that they think to make money with a basic no-binaries NNTP feed. Bad in that I would depend on the servers of good samaritans to give me my daily fix (you know who you are, thanks again). And because I will rediscover how bad skynet is again...