I am running slackware 10.0, KDE and Fluxbox, firefox, mozilla ETC.
All my browsers fail to load ebay pages with the same message "Document contains no data"
Pages load fine in Windows on same box.
56k external serial modem.
The system has been doing this for about 8 months now.
Any ideas.

Is it just ebay coming back with this problem, and can you physically ping www.ebay.co.uk (or your local ebay site) from the command line to make sure there's not some DNS issues causing problems? What if you hit the international sites such as ebay.com, ebay.de, ebay.fr, etc.?

I do a lot of shopping online and ebay is the only site I have problems with.

Ping does not seem to be working.
Five minutes have passes and this is all I get.
------
root@thunderbolt1:/# ping ebay.com
PING ebay.com (66.135.192.87) 56(84) bytes of data.
------

I used Ctrl-c to terminate the ping and I got this:

--- ebay.com ping statistics ---
731 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 729998ms

root@thunderbolt1:/#

Cool. What about an alternative to .com such as ebay.co.uk? Further, please post your nameservers as defined in /etc/resolv.conf - and are these being provided by your ISP?

My resolve.conf

----
search genext.net
nameserver 66.45.212.21
----

ip is correct.

I ran netconfig and pppsetup again and now I can browse all ebay pages without errors.

I still can not ping any domains outside my local host.

I am using a modem on a standalone box so I set up loopback network with netconfig.

I tried ebay.co.uk with same result.

root@thunderbolt1:~# ping www.ebay.co.uk
PING hp-intl-uk.ebay.com (66.135.208.96) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- hp-intl-uk.ebay.com ping statistics ---
25 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 24016ms

root@thunderbolt1:~#

Something must be wrong because I have used ping before.

So after re-running your connection settings, you can get onto ebay ? If I drop your nameservers onto my system, I can browse ebay fine so it's not a DNS issue...

Yes, now I can browse ebay just fine.
I do not know why ping will not work outside my box....
Thanks for the help.

Well, I don't think I did much to be honest, you were the one that re-ran your netconfig! But, I can't ping out to ebay curiously, though I've never actually tried before, regardless of whether i use my dns settings, or the one you provided...

At least it's working now, but still seems a little weird it refused for 8 months and now suddenly works!

I think I changed my hostname when I enabled php and apache, about 8 months ago.
My guess is a conflict between ppp setings and network settings, possibly security settings.

No idea about the ping problem.
I tried several domains both as root and as a regular user.
I can ping the domain on my box just fine.
Oh well, at least i can access my ebay seller pages now.

You pointed me the right direction and that got me thinking.