wow what a lot of information to read! thanks for all your help guys :) I am but an HND graduate with nearly a winter to summers worth of experience, with much much more to learn yet.. Now regarding that "subnet range" thing, they have it written down as "Subnet Mask 255.255.25**.0 **= Range from 2-5". I think its probably meant to interpreted as a choice of masks for the network i.e different schools have different network configurations, and make have 254 type of subnet on their internal network, and would probably use 252 on their external side of things. Either way, i'd like to add at this point that our provider probably isn't the best when it comes to technical knowledge - their support is lousy, communication is poor, and any contacts we do have in the organisation with some common sense are usually elsewhere trying to keep the ship together. Infact lately they setup a Netsweeper 2.0 trial which is supposed to be some really advanced content filtering, which does work to some degree, but when we have any trouble with it theres no support on it, neither is there any kind of channels to relay feedback on the testing... *sigh* at least they're free for this year! Anyway i'm going to go and digest what you all have written, and see what i can do with this new found knowledge ;) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com