Back on the air again via dial-up. First thanks to all who have sent helpful suggestions. I spent hours on the phone to iinet speaking to Stephen with no resolution to the problem. For any who are interested read on, the position is as follows.

1. OS 9 is supposedly supported. I referred Stephen to the section of the Standard Form of Agreement quoted by Lara. He found it but said it is not correct. My husband made the application and he does not remember reading that bit, but as he had a phone call about the death of a friend whilst he was doing it maybe his concentration was not as good as usual.

2. The ADSL Modem connects to iinet and all the addresses are supplied by the DHCP Server. As Onno guessed they do not use the DHCP Client ID.

3. I got IPNet Monitor. It costs $30 but you have a 3 week free trial period. I shall definitely purchase it.

4. When connected via ADSL the only address I could ping was the IP address.
When I connect via dial up I can ping the iinet and Curtain DNS addresses.

5. Stephen wondered if the IP address was faulty as I always got the same one, so far only 50 people are connected to BLIINK. They checked it out and rang back to say it worked OK.

6. They asked if I had a fire wall. Answer NO.

7. They have decided it is something else on my computer which is causing the trouble and want me to take it in (plus the modem) and let Justin (their Mac expert) have his way with it.

8. Answers to other questions.

Are you using PPPoE or static Ethernet? I don't know, I selected PPPoE on the screen which comes from the modem (in Netscape 4.77).

Are you on iinet's new Blink contract? YES
Are you using OS 9 or OS X for your connection? OS 9.2
Are using the Dlink DSL 300 modem? YES
Are you still using your internal modem? Only when I want to access the Internet via dial-up to send emails!

I am afraid some of Richard's queries were too technical for me as I am not OS X savvy.

9. I thought I would try using the iBook. In OS 9.1 I got a message that there was not room for another account but it would not let me delete the old one.

In OS X.O Internet Explorer loaded the page from the modem but kept giving me an error message saying it could not load the panel to access the page even though I could see it. I had to force quit several times but eventually deleted the old account and added the new one but every time I clicked on Connect IE produced the error message and the rolling ball. I gave up!

10. I tried in OS X.1.2 on the G4. Using IE I managed to access the page in the modem, it still had the correct details but the bottom half of the page was missing. I tried restarting everything but I got a message that the server was not accepting connections ie 192.168.0.1, the page in the modem, was now inaccessible. I rebooted in OS 9.2 and got the same thing. First time I got half the page then nothing. I gave up and went to bed. This morning I tried a again, same story.

But when I dialed in this morning and looked at my connection history there are two last night for 4 and 9 sec durations, probably from the iBook though the connection was too short to register on the screen.

11. When I changed the configuration in TCP/IP to use dial-up I noticed it had strange addresses in it, normally when you access the page in the modem it has the IP and server addresses as 192.168.0.1. This time I had IP 169.254.229.238, Server 224.0.9.251, the router was the same as the IP and the subnet mask was 255.255.0.0 (it is usually 255.255.255.0).

12. So I got rid of the settings and tried again. I got the full page this time and it indicated I was already CONNECTED to iinet, usual IP and gateway addresses. Netscape 4.77 kept telling me repeatedly that it could not connect to 192.168.0.1. I had to cancel the notice and quit quickly before it came up again. The connection history shows a 2 sec connection.

Conclusion: I think it is gremlins and quite beyond me to solve. We have ordered a router and wireless connection from WA Solutions so I think paying them to sort it out will be the least stressful option.

Diana