Responding to Andor. > Hey, how do you know when to insert disk2? When disk 1 stops spinning. > Refering to pop3 and smtp. > Shees nerd, I'd advise you include the texts of the relevant rfc-documents Yes, but it's not that hard. The commands are straightforward, like delete and retrieve etc. I've done it before, when my mail client wasn't working, or whatever. I could write a one page summary on how to get/send mail through telnet. > there are a lot of 3com modules. Right. I believe the mod I installed handles 3c590 and 3c900[abc] cards. Should I try to support some of the older 3c5xx cards? > If you have one full disk for the kernel, why not compile nearly every > network-device into it. Good idea. I may do this, but there was, not too long ago, a hard limit on the size of bzImage. It looked fine, but wouldn't uncompress and run properly. It just sat there, with a kernel panic on the screen, that I couldn't read. Frustrated the hell out of me. It happened at about 650K, which is where I'm at now. Maybe this bug has been fixed in 2.4, which is the kernel I'm using. I'll give it a try. I also have to think about the general utility of the system. I'm already pushing the limits of my wife's 16MB machine. If the kernel were any larger, I couldn't run all those internet tools. Well everything has a quarter gig these days - do I really have to worry about people with 16mb machines? I don't know. > using rlogin is always a security-risk (a program like hunt can spy > or even ttakeover the link). Yes, but I'm on a nonstandard port. The average hacker wouldn't think to go there. Still, I might try to use ipchains to make sure all the packets come from my box. I have a static ip address, so I can set this up. Nobody's going to figure out how to spoof the ip addresses during the short time that I'm connected to somebody else's box, and once things are working over there, I'll probably never have to make that particular connection again. With a me-and-only-me ipchains rule, it's really quite safe. > Look at the debian-install disks, they don't use lilo but some other nice loadlin I think. But they just try to boot and put you up on a cd. I don't think they give you a functional linux internet ready system just from a couple of floppies. Correct me if I'm wrong. Karl