Thanks, Alan.  I'm going to have him check with his provider.  I think your 
reasoning may be right on.

The following question is for my education, so there's no need to respond!  ;-)

I'm wondering if your suggestion does explain the situation.  It may not be 
so much the *telnet* into the box, as it is that he's on a 2nd box that has 
awakened the DSL connection at his house?  In effect the telnet is 
irrelevant, it's the awakened DSL that's allowing me to get back in.

His account is a personal not a business account.  I wonder if that's one 
way of keeping people from setting up web servers at home.

A little more to the story:
The other night I scheduled his server to ping every 3 minutes.  It was 
late, and I had been working with windows that day and was used to the 
"ping 4 times and quit" behavior.  When I scheduled the pings, I didn't 
specify a count.  Basically, I was able to get into the server that day - 
all day.  He called me later that night and asked what I was doing with the 
server because it was really churning.  Turns out every 3 minutes I was 
scheduling a ping.  Ugh!

What's worse...I had set the server to ping my address (or so I 
thought).  Turns out I was ping flooding another friend.  His 4th octect is 
8 digits more than mine and when I'm tired I have been known to switch 
them.  This was one of those cases.  Not only was I scheduling a gazillion 
pings, I was actually attempting to ping-flood someone else too!

Once you stop laughing at my goofup, I'm wondering if your answer might 
explain that phenomenon.

I didn't share that little tidbit (in addition to the fact that it makes me 
look like an idiot) because I was unable to get into the server today after 
scheduling a ping with a count of 1 every 3 minutes.  I wondered if perhaps 
my ability to access the server was unrelated to the scheduled ping-flood 
from the day before.  Now I'm not so sure.  I think I will reschedule a 
single, infinite ping and see if that enables access.

On a different note: When I discovered the ping-flood mistake, I was 
expecting 320 pings to be running on the server (16 hours * 20 pings an 
hour), but there were not nearly that many.  Makes me wonder if perhaps 
ping defaults to stopping after X attempts.  If so, X is a number much 
higher than the windows choice of 4, but much higher than I've ever let a 
ping run before manually stopping it.

At 02:06 PM 12/19/2003 -0800, you wrote:

>Keith,
>
>IIRC, DSL is not always an 'always on' solution from the outside world. I
>think that depends on the providers policy.
>
>This doesn't explain why the fix you mention causes it all to work again,
>but my guess is that the DSL line is not 'up' when you try to connect.
>
>On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Keith Parker wrote:
>
> >Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:01:34 -0600
> >From: Keith Parker <kparker4@midsouth.rr.com>
> >To: netbsd-help@netbsd.org
> >Subject: Server sometimes unresponsive to attempts at remote connection
> >
> >Hi all,
> >
> >Anyone run into a problem where remote access attempts (ssh, telnet, ftp)
> >are periodically not responded to by the server?
> >The problem expresses itself like this: I try unsuccessfully to access the
> >(remote) server all day (after a night of inactivity).  When the server's
> >owner gets home (where the server is), I call them.  They attempt to telnet
> >in from another box, and then say "Hmm...I can telnet in locally from a PC
> >on the server's network".  After they successfully establish a connection,
> >or at least get a login prompt, I can access the machine.
> >
> >My first thought was that the machine might be going into some kind of
> >BIOS-induced sleep mode.  I checked to see if the PC's BIOS power
> >management options were enabled, but they weren't.  He's got the server on
> >a KVM switch, and assures me that it isn't being touched.  I've installed
> >the same configuration on 2 other PCs and have had no problems getting into
> >them.
> >
> >The only differences between those two and the unfriendly one is (1) the PC
> >age and brand, though all are PII class (2) The two other locations use
> >cable (static IP) and the unresponsive one is on DSL (static IP).
> >
> >The NetBSD 1.6.1 install was default, I haven't tweaked any power
> >management stuff there.
> >I'm a bit early in the troubleshooting process, but thought I'd check to
> >see if anyone had any advice.
> >
> >Does anyone have any thoughts on possible things I might explore?
> >
> >Thanks
> >
> >