PPP connection can't find servers

[Jake Hoban]

Apologies if this has been posted before - I've only just subscribed.   I'm in the process of a new debian installation via floppies and ppp. I've got to the point where it dials my ISP to get to the FTP server, but it never connects to it and after a while the modem hangs up. I had this problem once on another machine, and the reason was no entries in /etc/resolv.conf. But both the nameservers are in there this time. I've tried pinging the loopback IP address, which works. But I can't ping anything else, not even the name servers.