Redhat 7 and NIC not available

Stick with RH8 !

At least you got everything working now.
I once read that "what you get when you fail to fix something ... is experience!" which is true and also help develop excellent troubleshooting skils!

Mm remember a couple of things tom,

first off linux commands are case sensitive.. in other words Ping wont work, ping will. if it doesnt seem to happen go to the directory where its located (/bin) and try and run it. If this doesn't happen try typing ./ping (whenever one of my binaries dont run i try this and they usually work)

Also as a quick tip, if you want to quickly go to root without logging out and logging in, you can just type 'su' (im not sure if that means super-user, switch user but anyway then it just asks you for the root password and you're temporarily root. When done, type exit.

You can 'su' to any user.. example if logged in as root, you can 'su tfs' as litigative as that may sound

To move to the gui and get out of it, you can use the ' command telinit'.
telinit 3 run from the GUI will exit the gui and give you the shell
telinit 5 does the opposite.

Basically 3 or 5 specifies what run level you're at.. the list of runlevels was already in your inittab file. I'll just type it out again anyway.

runlevel 0 - shutdown
runlevel 1 - single-user mode (good if you forgot root password)
runlevel 2 - user definable
runlevel 3 - full multi user mode
runlevel 4 - user definable
runlevel 5 - full multi user mode with X windows GUI
runlevel 6 - reboot

Good luck