Comcast Mail writes: > RCA Comcast modem: works fine. > I can ping myself, and I can ping other ethernet addresses on the > comcast network. Probably unrelated, but I had Comcast in Albuquerque in 2000 and never got it to work with the pump version that shipped with Debian at the time. I never had trouble with ISC's DHCP client. I suggest disabling your firewall entirely. Disable all services that are running on the external interface. Run any services you need on the loopback interface. Test this by using nmap on your external IP. To be safe, run it from a separate computer. Once you get the networking going you can enable the firewall. Don't trust your ISP's DNS caches. Large cable providers are notorious for not being able to reliably provide basic service such as DNS resolution and outgoing SMTP. I've heard bad things about Comcast DNS in other locations, but I wouldn't expect it to be any better here. (Related musing: I use Road Runner only for network connectivity and have been very impressed by their service. I am moving from Eden Prairie to St. Paul next week, and I am disappointed that I cannot continue my service with RR. They are by far the best broadband provider I have ever used.) Install your own DNS cache. This will assure that you always have reliable, reasonably secure DNS service. It is always possible for your upstream to forge DNS responses. But you don't have to worry about security holes in their DNS servers that allow an attacker to poison the cache. Follow these instructions to setup a local DNS cache: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/install.html http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/run-cache.html If you are using ISC's DHCP client, use this in /etc/dhclient.conf: prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, routers; Unfortunately, there is no option to tell dhclient not to touch /etc/resolv.conf, but this assures that it has the correct information. -- David Phillips <david at acz.org> http://david.acz.org/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list