Well, I've done a complete clean installation of potato from the five floppy images over a cable connection. Thanks for all the help.
I'm in the process of recompiling my kernel to enable IP Masq, but I have another problem. I cannot get my computer to use more than one interface at a time with potato's interface setup. I've read the interfaces manpage, and that helped me to create this /etc/network/interfaces file: # /etc/network/interfaces -- configuration file for ifup(8), ifdown(8) # The loopback interface iface lo inet loopback # The first network card iface eth0 inet dhcp # The second network card iface eth1 inet static address 172.16.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 172.16.1.255 network 172.16.1.0 gateway 172.16.1.1 I can use ifup for only one of my ethernet interfaces at a time. If both are running, I can't ping anything, either local (eth1) or non-local (eth0). I have to have dhcpcd runnning to send this, and ifconfig -a shows: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:A0:C9:91:19:B1 inet addr:24.124.60.7 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:34073 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:18195 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:4 txqueuelen:100 Interrupt:10 Base address:0xc000 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:95:42:55:3B inet addr:172.16.1.1 Bcast:172.16.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 BROADCAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:59 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 Interrupt:11 Base address:0xe800 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 LOOPBACK MTU:3924 Metric:1 RX packets:17 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:17 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 Thanks for any suggestions, once again. I promised my wife I'd have the network back up and online this evening. ;-) John