Fix from author of the driver:

The i++ loop from 1..1000 is too small on very fast machines like
PII 450 MHz. Increasing the loop from 1..100000 lets the machine
access PHY. After this patch it's possible to use a SMC PCI card
on a HP Kayak XA series PC Workstation. Workaround until this fix
was to enable debugging in the driver (#define EPIC_DEBUG 1).

Without that patch you get an undefined state:
while true
do
ifconfig -a | grep status:
done
The status messages flaps between two values, but not
"connected".