I've got a machine set up as a gateway from my work network (which is Internet, but all behind firewalls, etc) to a linux COW connected on a hub. Access from the COW to the gateway has never been a problem, but on the last gateway I was using, we were having intermittent network access. The hosts.deny has ALL:ALL in it, and hosts.allow has the proper allowances; at any rate, it's nothing to do with inetd, I don't think. Now I'm using a totally different computer, except for the network card, and I'm getting the same error. I am not inclined to think that the NIC is the problem, because the system seems to be rather uniform in how long it will let me stay logged on before I get booted with the "Connection to host lost." error.

If I boot the machine, and come back to my desk and try to log in from my desktop machine, it will work, but only for between 1 and 2 minutes. It then boots me, and when I try to re-connect, it says, "Connecting to m1...Could not open a connection to host: Connect failed." When I try to connect using my ssh client, I get a popup window saying "Connection refused."

I'm running Slackware 8.0, fyi. Any help you could afford me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!