I'm having very serious network problems with SuSE 7.1, and was wondering (a) if there are known bugs and (b) if are there known solutions.

I've tried installing the system several ways. Most recently, I did a completely vanilla SuSE 'default' installation of 7.1 (not an upgrade). My network card (a 3Com 3c900B) is recognized and seems to work. In fact, nsf appears work properly (both mounting and exporting). telnet also works (both connecting and accepting logins). However:

(i) The system does not respond to pings. It can initiate pings and receives the correct response, but if I ping it from another system, there is no response.

(ii) Characters get mangled when transmitted by X applications. For example, if I set the X display to another node and start Xemacs, the Xemacs window appears correctly on the remote X server, but when I type, the wrong characters get transmitted. From past experience, I know this to be a network/transmission problem, not an X problem.

I am using the default 2.218 kernel - the same problem occurs with the 386 kernel. As far as I know, there are no precompiled kernel updates. SuSE support said to upgrade nkitb and nkitserv. This made matter worse: after upgrading, outgoing pings yield 'wrong byte' errors.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Barnet Wagman