I spoke with a hero, today. He is to me anyway. I called up his Internet Service Providing company and asked whether or not they supported Linux. He said they didn't officially, but several of the people there ran Linux at home and they be sure to do what they could to help me. I explained my problem, and that I had already prepaid a year to this other provider who didn't support Linux at all, and very little else from my experience. Now this gentleman stayed on the line with me for over half an hour and actually helped me locate the crux of my problem proving that he knew more about DSL modems and routers than I or my existing ISP and he was helping me with my Linux setup. Together we determined that I had a cable connected wrongly. Then he explained that I probably didn't need to bother with all this pppoe stuff, like filling in my name and password. He suspected that all that stuff was probably in the modem already and I could treat is like a router in a LAN. We configured a new (device?? / connection??), as an eth0 rather than a DSL and when I activated it I actually got text appearing in the window telling me it was searching for a connection, but it still failed to log on. At that point he had to go, after going above and beyond the call of service. I got back to my ISP and we tried a few things and determined that their modem was not establishing a link with their own service. They said they'd call me back. An hour and a half later, they hadn't, so I called them. Apparently they contacted Bell and Bell says their "board" for this line isn't working properly and it's not supporting the speed that is needed. It will be several days for it to be fixed. They were supposed to call me back, but they hadn't even though they had promised to and I was waiting for the information they already had. I am really sorry I paid a year in advance with mycybernet.net. The guy who was a big help is over at S S I Internet here in Ottawa and that is a company that should do well if there are more like him. Maybe I'll get sorted out when the phone line is repaired. -- Regards, Fred Williams <unclefred [ at ] fredwilliams [ dot ] ca> <http://www.fredwilliams.ca>