Well, after further investigation, I've managed to solve this problem. It turns out to be a matter of permissions. I logged on as root, and was able to connect with the web browser. I also noticed that an error message "hostname not found" that occurred when loading X as a user also did not occur. This gave me a clue. After much wandering around the hard disk, I found that RH 8.0 apparently installs copies of /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf in a directory etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default and uses these instead of the ones in /etc to determine hostname and nameserver information (or at least my copy does). Once I changed the permissions on them from 600 to 644, the problems disappeared. Now, what I am curious about is that this setup does not occur on RH7.3. The directory etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default is there but is empty. So is this "feature" new to RH 8.0, and is using the files here to override the files in /etc normal, or is it just my system and somehow I have screwed it up? I would think that if this was deliberate, than the files between /etc and etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default would be links, not distinct files. Would anyone with RH8.0 take a moment and see if etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default exists on their system and what is in it, if anything. To all those who took the time to help, my thanx. And to those who designed Red Hat 8.0 (Psycho), if this is a deliberate feature, a resounding Bronx cheer for the three days lost over this issue. BOF
