Hmm. I doubt that you can do this in a cross-platform manner. There's no guarantee that a NIC is even in a 'slot' (I'm assuming you mean PCI-X slots, but it could be anything - that's really my point.) The best way to do that, IMHO, is to have a system-dependent script get called to locate the NIC (sorry, can't help you on the details of _how_), then convert slot number you get back into an english description (so later you can have it cover NICs built-in on motherboards, or over firewire, or in PC card slots, etc.. On unix systems, I expect you can get useful info by poking around in the /dev hierarchy (or using modules that do it for you). Good luck.