I have ADSL comming into a wireless gateway/modem. I connect that through Ethernet into a Linksys router. I then connect two computers, one with XP and another with Debian Sarge, into it.

The internet is fine on the XP computer, but with the Debian I get strange results. It will work sometimes very well, but a few minutes later, it will time-out trying to connect to google.

I've tried booting Knoppix, and it has the same problem. It can't be a hardware problem with the NIC I'm using because I tried two different ones (One from Linksys and another from Compaq).

One thing that bothers me is that the internet will only work --either on the XP or on the Debian box-- when the modem is connected into one of the regular slots on the Linksys router, not into the Internet slot.

When I set up the ADSL, I put the DNS Servers into the modem, not in XP.

The main thing that baffles me is why it works wonderfully sometimes, and terribly the next minute.

Thank you.