Hi all
my closure of this problem is long overdue - my apologies.
My ISP forgot that I existed shortly after the previous message on this topic, leaving me with no way of communicating to the list. After dumping them and setting up a new connection I have not had this problem again and still don't understand what the problem was - to recap dialup worked but DNS lookups did not - I assume that the problem was BCAK. Sorry.
I ran another SuSE kernel patch through YOU yesterday and once again the dialup failed afterwards. This time, however, I had diagnostics to run from this posting. The new ltmodem module wasn't running, giving me the error "Failed to open /dev/ttyLT0: No such device or address". I checked, just to make sure that it was still there and had permissions, and was then able to follow Volker's initial diagnosis and solution from last time. The latest version of the ltmodem module had been installed but was not running. Before reverting to an old kernel and module I decided to try simply uninstalling the module through YaST and installing it again from a copy I had been able to get from a SuSE ftp site. Worked a treat and I am once again online.
Seems I have to learn something from my kernel upgrade issues and either start building my own or buy an external. Perhaps both would be better.
Thanks again for all of your help - I learnt a great deal about where in the system to look when I have such problems and can now sort screen output alphabetically (:
Andy
