I was testing my laptop which has LM 8.0 installed. I had a terminal window open and was pinging www.abc.com. All of a sudden, the message that the network was unreachable came up. This goes on for 20 or 30 tries and then the network comes back again. I went to my box that connects to the internet - again running LM 8.0 and started a ping to my ISP's gateway. It worked fine with no interruptions. I went back to the laptop and started pinging the same gateway which worked for a while, and then stopped, and then started. I opened a second terminal window and ran ifconfig which showed both my eth0 and localhost devices. However, when the network became unreachable, ifconfig first showed nothing, and when tried again only showed localhost. Next try and eth0 was back and the ping started running properly again. I am using an Ositech Jack of Diamonds combo card (network + modem) which was detected properly on install and has worked flawlessly for as long as I have had it. It worked great without this type of problem when I was using LM 7.2. Given the problems I have had with 8.0 and the laptop, I am thinking of regressing to 7.2 (no no - just kidding). Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome... Tom.
