I have a very puzzling networking problem. I'm hopping someone here has solved something similar.

I am setting up a web server using SuSE 10.0. I drove it out to it's permanent home yesterday but could not get the network to work. The link light was on, but for all other intents and purposes, it was unplugged. I could not ping anything, including the router and other boxes on the same subnet. I could not ping google by it's IP address.

The IP address was hard set, routing was correct.
Before someone replies with a list of dns issues, bear in mind that I could not ping by IP address.
We tried several different network cards.
We tried different cables.
We tried different ports on the switch, and then a different switch.

After I brought it back to the office, it mysteriously worked again (set up a nat router to that IP range for testing). I can think of several far fetched reasons why it might not have worked, but none make any sense (MAC address filtering for example). The company hosting for us should know if they are doing something terribly weird with their hardware. This is the first box that they have seen that simply doesn't work.

I only learned later that it was Friday the 13th...

It sounds like the issue was the router itself. On most routers other than home routers you can block certain traffic for each port or block the port entirely. Also note that since icmp (used by ping) is its own protocol it is possible that other traffic (telnet/ssh) might have worked but icmp itself is blocked.

i agree wiht jlightner icmp may be blocked by a router.
Make a crossover cable plug it into another pc with a static ip and ping it. If it is successfull then that will give you a good starting point

This makes sense, but is very unlikely. The company that is providing us with bandwidth is letting us plug into the same switch that their computers are plugged into. While I can see the possibility of the router blocking ICMP outbound, and all the other computers on the subnet blocking ICMP, this doesn't make sense. For example, other computers on that subnet (and switch) can successfully ping google. Using that same google IP address, our computer can't.

Likewise, we cannot ping their router when plugged in onsite, but they can. Once back at the office, we can ping their router just fine.

We will be going back out sometime this week, and bringing some additional hardware (cross over cable for example), but I don't think we will be able unplug any of their boxes (possible but very unlikely).

They're probably using VLANs across the switches.