DNS on a Dial-up connection

[jpinx]

Hi Everyone- Old newbie here with Debian on my Toshiba laptop. I'm trying to get my Dial-Up internet connection and have managed to get the modem recognised and dialling out happily, and I get the local and remote IP's, the IP's of the DNS servers, and I can ping an IP number, but I can not ping a name. I have made some entries in /etc/hosts andthey operate correctly, so resolv.d appears to be working correctly. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am stumped for other possibilities. Slainte, John --- Please excuse the terrible formatting, I'm having to use the Lynx Browser on another machine I have ssh access to, until I get this problem sorted. Any/all comments annd advice much appreciated.

[jpinx]

More on this problem - Iused pppconfig to set the connection up with dynamic DNS and I use pon/poff to establish the connection. I have ALL: ALL in /etc/hosts.deny and ALL: LOCAL in /etc/hosts.allow, though I have tried ALL: ALL in /etc/hosts.allow to see if it made any difference, but no luck. I can see that /etc/resolv.conf gets re-written when the connection is made, and the correct DNS IP's are inserted. I am running tail -f /var/log/syslog and can see that everything is going fine with the modem and connection, and I can ping and ssh by IP - hence being able to use lynx over ssh on a remote box to write this. I would be really grateful for any and all help and comments to point me int eh right direction. The man pages for resolv and hosts and route don't cover this eventuality and I'm not clever or knowledgeable enough to know what to try next. Slainte, JohnP.