Much thanks for all the responses, I sincerely appreciate your suggestions.
@Indranil's suggestion: Your MacBook Air's USB ethernet adapter looks like a winner for my scenario. Will inquire @ Lam Road. Please do share your experience with it in case you have acquired it already.
@Bhavesh Khare: Belkin USB 2.0 - will look into it and see if it has drivers in the Linux kernel. Since you have mentioned only Mac OS X I am a bit hesitant. Is it possible for you to find the chipset on it? I got burnt with a Rs. 400 USB NIC with the Davicom chipset that worked in Windows but not in Linux - it is not even paper weight material now :) I have a SMC USB NIC (Realtek chip), for my personal use, that has worked great for the last 7 years but I have not been able to source it @ Lam Rd. For the interim, I have installed it in the client's router box on a loaner basis.
@Manish Kathuria: Multi-port LAN cards are (a) way too expensive and also (b) hard to source @ Lam Road even from the vendors who specialize on servers. If you know of any vendor that does have multiport PCI ( for 5.5v PCI slot) cards DLink will do, please let me know. At the least, I i will price it
TIA -- Arun Khan