Here's the final answer from my ISP on the situation.... Moral of the story... do NOT add inline comments in your /etc/network/interfaces file. D'OH!!!
emma ----- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Dear customer, This appears to have been the result of a misconfiguration of your server's network settings. The following shows a section of the output of /sbin/ifconfig when logging into your server for the first time: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:76:62:08:D6 inet addr:66.98.212.88 Bcast:66.255.255.255 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2167163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:388376 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:219992274 (209.8 MiB) TX bytes:143736757 (137.0 MiB) Interrupt:21 Base address:0x5000 You'll notice your netmask is incorrectly set to 255.0.0.0 and your broadcast is also incorrect. This is causing a problem when your server attempts to communicate with any other 66.*.*.* ip addresses. 255.0.0.0 is the default netmask for that ip address because it is considered a "class A" ip address. I noticed your interface seemed to be properly set up in /etc/network/interfaces: iface eth0 inet static address 66.98.212.88 # 1st from ifconfig netmask 255.255.254.0 # 3rd from ifconfig network 66.98.212.0 # 1st from route -n broadcast 66.98.213.255 # 2nd from ifconfig gateway 66.98.212.1 # last line, 2nd column of route -n However, restarting networking on your server did not correct it. After looking at "man interfaces" I noticed the line "Lines starting with `#' are ignored." I have backed up your interfaces file and removed the comments. Afterwards, restarting networking fixed the problem: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:76:62:08:D6 inet addr:66.98.212.88 Bcast:66.98.213.255 Mask:255.255.254.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2170964 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:389885 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:220340242 (210.1 MiB) TX bytes:143963357 (137.2 MiB) Interrupt:21 Base address:0x5000 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Emma Jane Hogbin [[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]