Hi all, I've got a network server set up that runs a basic installation of Debian Potato - no X, etc. Because our ISP uses DHCP that's what the server set to use, and most of the time it works just fine (It's set up with dhcp-client). But every now and then it loses the connection altogether. At first I thought this was due to the unreliability of the ISP, and this was the reason on some occasions. But not all the time ... if I was having a problem I would usually run '/etc/init.d/networking restart' and it would reconfigure the network and most of the time that would be enough, but not always. Sometimes it would claim to find the ISP's gateway, would bind itself to some IP address and display the number of seconds till the next lease. Yet pinging a known IP address (eg the university's) would either not go through or even more shockingly return with the response 'operation not permitted'. There was a Windows-like solution to all this though - shutdown, reboot and re-run '/etc/init.d/networking restart'.
This problem seems to have something to do with leases, but also with the ISP going down and the network not coming back up when the ISP is back up. This is a mystery I'd very much like solved if possible. -- David P. James Third Year Economics Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario http://members.home.com/dpjames/ The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. -Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
