Recently installed Freespire 1.0.4 (2.6.14-gratis #1 PREEMPT i686 GNU/Linux) on a Dell box, attached to our small SOHO LAN, which runs on another old Dell under SuSE/Novell 10.0. Things seem to work pretty well, but for reasons I can't fathom, the Freespire box pings (ICMP 8) the LAN server every couple of seconds, to which the server duly responds. I can't tell what process is responsible for all this pinging, or what purpose it might possibly serve, but I'd like to get rid of this gratuitous network traffic, if possible. Tcpdump and ethereal don't give me enough info to go on. Any advice appreciated...

Blessings,
Denis

Open a terminal window such as Konsole or Gnome Terminal and run the top utility. The process that is responsible should appear near the top each time a ping is issued.