A major bug in GNE put HawkNL properly in little endian mode when using NO_NET network type, but any other type such as NL_IP called nlInit after nlEnable(NL_LITTLE_ENDIAN_DATA), which erased this setting. Amazingly, over all these years this error was not caught. I very seriously thought about changing all documentation and having GNE use big endian all the time, but decided to fix the bug and use little endian consistently.
Thanks goes out to Héber Costa Ferreira for finding this problem in GNE/HawkNL and providing suggestions, code, and testing effort to fix this issue.
This change has been commited into GNE SVN as of revision 680. If you are not using the SVN version of GNE, you should, it is much more stable than 0.70 and contains many critical fixes.