Under for what it's worth.................after much hair pulling, all is well. My inability to ping turned out to be a problem on the windows disk. For some reason my NIC lost it's irq in windows and for whatever reason (way beyond me) it prevented SuSE networking from functioning, even though everything looked normal. Oh the shame for ever suspecting linux. Windows bites you in the butt even when it's isolated on another disk. Talk about insidious. Thanks all for the help. This was another step forward in understanding linux even though it felt like several backwards ones! Tom -- TRBishop tb64710@ltec.net Registered Linux User #12043 -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/