<div>David, I realized that I replied directly to you and not the list, and you replied to me, so your last reply didn't make it to the list. Sorry for any confusion :) </div><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote"> I was wondering about some of these files I had to create to make things work in the first place. Thanks Joshua, I'll be checking /etc/resolv.conf as well when I get to school on Monday. Symptoms of the problem include: <ul><li>thin clients wouldn't boot</li><li>when I did ifconfig, the nics were reported as eth2 and eth3 while the /etc/network/interfaces stated eth0 and eth1.</li><li>a network person spent 15 minutes trying to help but even though he was able to get ifconfig to say that it was on the required static ip it still wasn't working.</li></ul></blockquote> You should definitely change the nics in /etc/network/interfaces to match the ones on your server, reported by ifconfig. or do what alkisg said. it sounds silly but also make sure that eth0 and eth1 are the cards you are expecting them to be. i always identify the cards by plugging the cable in and running (in the case of eth1): # cat /sys/class/net/eth1/operstate which returns either down or up. many times i have mixed up the wan-side nic with the thin client nic. I'd suspect that because of the issues in /etc/network/interfaces, the dhcp server failed to start, which meant that your thin clients won't boot. -- joshua higgins >>>>>>------