Hi all, I thought I understood networking (at least reasonably well) until now, but I'm staying in a hotel using my SuSE 9.3 laptop as a client to their wireless LAN and am seeing behavior that's making me doubt my sanity. I turn on and tell netgo to connect to an open wireless network, which it does. My wireless interface gets configured (as 192.168.1.131 as it happens), the default route and DNS both are pointed at 192.168.1.1, so I'm assuming it's a very simple configuration like most the boxes one might use at home (Linksys, or similar--if it was Belkin it would be 192.168.2.1 I believe :) Anyway, I do this, and I can connect to google.com and some other sites OK. However, some sites, probably 2/3 of all sites I've tried, and 99% of the more obscure ones (e.g. publib.boulder.ibm.com and theserverside.com--not sites that one might expect to be filtered) either come back immediately claiming they refused the connection, or they just time out. I ran ethereal and noticed that the refusals are coming in as those "unreachable" packets (they're ICMP aren't they?) with the "administratively cancelled" (or similar) flag set. The ones that time out just time out. There doesn't appear to be a rhyme or reason as to which will be refused and which will time out, and this seems to change from time to time. E.g. when I arrived, I got immediately rejected by both Earthlink's web-based mail site and by mail.yahoo.com (but not by yahoo.com itself). Later that night, earthlink started working, and yahoo disappeared entirely. Now they're both unavailable again. Oh to add to the info, there's a wire-connected machine available for public use in this hotel's lobby, and it seems to be able to connect to pretty much anything. Once in a while it get's blown off, but no more than is a believable rate for the Internet as a whole. But to add to the confusion, the IP addresses from the local DNS don't always agree with those I get from home. (I managed to connect to my home system usins ssh, and read email from there! While I was at it, I noticed that the dns results for many inaccessible sites were different.) That could be dynamic load balancing at work, but yesterday I tried to connect to my own system and the address was total nonsense. Could this be some strange attempt at filtering being done by the hotel? Or a bizzare effect of a massively overloaded, or interference-prone, wireless infrastructure, someone in the hotel doing strange things to me (my firewall is running, and I didn't see lots of unrecognizable traffic with ethereal), or a prelude to martian invasion. Or, something else I should know about? Cheers Simon "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com