All, After my installation of SuSe Enterprise Server 7, I was having some trouble setting up my static ip address. I couldn't ping machines on my subnet or other subnets, nor could I ping the machine from other machines. ifconfig showed that the card was communicating with the network and activity was going on at some level. After some various advice and messing around, I was magically able to ping other machinesby changing the following values: /etc/nsswitch.conf file: from: hosts: files dns network: files dns to: hosts: files dns6 network: files dns6 However, once I rebooted the problem showed up again. I'm pretty sure this is the only file I changed, but I'm not sure. I've doubled check my /etc/resolve.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/host.conf as well as a bunch of others but nothing looks wrong and I can't ping any other machines!! I have no idea where to look next. Can anyone help me out with what I should be looking for to configure my laptop with a static IP address? Thanks, Jon.