I'm running archlinux on my laptop and debian on a netbook in my bedroom which is connected to an external hard drive which I use for backups. Every morning when I try to ssh the netbook, I have connection problems. After fooling around with it for a while, it goes through and then I have no problems until I shut the laptop off and start up again. The most consistent way of getting through is to ping the netbook until the ping goes through, which might take a couple dozen pings. It's not a big deal but I'm wondering if this is a normal problem and what I might try to fix it.

Sounds like your netbook is going to sleep and needs to be waken up before you can ssh into it. I'd start there and check the settings of it.

Even if I go and wake it up first, I get the same results. It doesn't go to sleep, it just shuts off the display. But I'll wake the display up and still the same results.

In the mornings can you ping it without issues? Are all your devices on the same subnet? Are you sure nothing is going to sleep? Try pinging it during the evening to see if it responds.

I'm sure nothing is sleeping. The difference seems to be turning my laptop. When I turn it off an back on later, I can't ssh without pinging it a few dozen times. Here's what I get when I ssh:

$ ssh ewl@192.168.2.8
ssh: connect to host 192.168.2.8 port 22: No route to host

And here's the result from pinging:

$ ping 192.168.2.8
PING 192.168.2.8 (192.168.2.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=4 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=5 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=6 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.2.5 icmp_seq=7 Destination Host Unreachable
64 bytes from 192.168.2.8: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=2070 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.8: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=1061 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.8: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=62.0 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.8: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.78 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.8: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.62 ms

This instance corrected rather quickly. Sometimes it fails more often before it goes through.

I'm going to say this is your Laptop that is causing your issues.

How do you have your laptop network configured?
Using wireless what AP do you have?
Can you ping the gateway as soon as the laptop is powered on?
what does ifconfig give you when you turn on the laptop?

Could be that the loss is your router trying to find the netbook as the MAC table doesn't hold information for ever. and it has to re-acquire the MAC address of the netbook.

It's fairly normal for networking equipment to be turned off when a computer is asleep, and for it to take a few seconds to reconnect, e.g. if it's wireless.