On Thursday, November 4, 2004, at 05:15 PM, John Hunt wrote:

> address for our building but, i cant ftp anything so all my attempts 
> to install new packages are futile.  It says "no address for that 
> hostname"  What i think is happening is that DNS isnt working, because 
> i pinged a friends computer by his IP address, but i cant ping 
> something like www.google.com.  I thought

I think that this is separate from your issue, but pinging big name 
guys can fail as they simply fail to respond to ping requests.

Better perhaps is to try and ping your univ. mailserver host name, or 
something like that.  Those usually will echo the ping back.  But if 
the ftp attempts are failing with that error I think you are right 
about the cause.

As to DNS lookups faillng, did you put a DNS entry in /etc/resolv.conf? 
  That might help.  It's been ages since I set mine up though, so I've 
used those grey cells to store other info :) but I think that's a good 
place to start.

HTH.

Brian

-- 
... we parted each feeling
superior to the other and is not that
feeling after all one of the great
desiderata of social intercourse
-archy
_The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel_