Long story short: a friend began the setup of a debian box for me (i'm a little overbusy with work and a very long commute), wasn't familiar with debian, never seemed to "get it," eventually gave up in frustration.
So, i'm now trying to decipher the setup of a box with stable r 6 installed. I've the details of the current LAN setup below. >From any one of the laptops we can telnet to the Debian box's IP address. The connection happens almost immediately (an event logged in syslog and, depending on the telnet client, the message that connection has been made appears). Then there is a very long wait before the login message appears. I'm pretty sure this is a DNS lookup issue. What I'd like to do is configure the Debian box so that if it sees an IP in the DHCP range of the LAN it doesn't do reverse lookup. On the other hand, if I should be using the Lynksys box as a nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf let me know! My next step will be getting the box to see the outside world. I've never set up a system using a Linksys box or in a DHCP environment. While my friend's home network is also behind a Lynksys box, they have a number of assigned static IPs -- they don't have the DHCP range issue. Thanks for any thoughts and pointers. Cheers, judith NETWORK CONDITION: We have a home LAN behind a Linksys DSL router (model BEFSER41). The Debian box has a static routing path set up in the Linksys system. The other systems (Win ME laptop, OS X 10.1 laptop, and Win98 box) have dynamic address. The other systems all have names available and visible on the SMB/Microsoft Network nonsense. There are no domain names in use locally by the laptops and Win98 box. The Debian box thinks its domain is grey-cat.net (and I plan to eventually use something like zoneclient from zoneclient.sourceforge.net to use that domain for the box). telnetd is running on the Debian box. The Debian box can ping a laptop on the LAN successfully (by IP address); it cannot ping the outside world. A laptop can ping the Debian box successfully (by IP address), as well as anywhere else in the outside world . My friend says he had the Debian box so it could connect to the 'net from his home LAN. I've commented out all his nameservers from resove.conf and confirmed I my ISP's nameserver specified. If I should be using the Lynksys box as a nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf let me know! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]