well, for a network connection, it's more complicated than what's displayed. 1)Physically, you need to have physical link, each NIC chip has registers to indicate if link status is up(i.e., connected to another peer which is also powered up). This also triggers autoneg if configured. 2)Logically, the driver for this NIC should be loaded, and the logical interface of the corresponding physical interface should be configured up( administrative up). Once the above 2 are satisfied, you'll the icon o