a last question before i retire for the day. for some reason i'm only able to use one machine to access (ping) the gateway.
to be a little less vague: 2 comps connected to a hub which gets it's 'uplink' from the gateway. one of these computers can ping the gateway (both external ip and internal) and the net. while the other can only ping the other none gateway computer but neither the internal or external ip of the gateway. the gateway can only ping the fully connected machine, no response from the other. when switching the sockets (i.e. 'red' went in 'tp1' so now 'tp2' and 'blue' from 'tp2' to 'tp1') to which the rj-45 plugs are connected to the hub results in a switch of roles between the fully operational computer and the less functional one. this obviously suggests something is wrong with the hub.. but there's not exactly much that can be done to make things go wrong... it's a tp-link 10BASE-T hp8m ethernet hub. can someone explain this behavior, any hunches.. etc? Brendon
