question: I was trying to see why a client in Craig, CO couldn't connect to their ISP Amigo.net using any of 4 different phone numbers. I had them call their second phone line to verify (to both themselves and me) that the problem was NOT with the local machine. so from my end I pinged amigo.net and amigo.net's DNS servers also. all timed out. out of curiosity I pinged earthlink.net. timed out. but ANY other domain I could think of responded 100% and no lossed packets. other domains included some of my domains with godaddy.com and places like google.com just to check my pinging among others. but when you browse in IE to amigo.net it works fine. I even checked this clients email on amigo's web interface to verify their account was alive, current, and active and it is. so what's the deal? why can I not ping amigo.net and get a response? I am behind a university firewall, is that the problem? I shut off my local machine firewall just in case to test this and that wasn't it. I could understand if amigo has their servers blocking any pinging activity so I am guessing that is the problem with the lack of ping, but not the lack of connectivity from their dialup connection. I called a couple of the 4 available numbers for their ISP modem lines and they are all actively responding with standard modem connection signals. any ideas why on both the connection (which I didn't really make it a point to detail here I know) and the pinging thing? (mainly the pinging is what I am curious of right now). thanks as always! Chuck

Odds are they block pings to prevent denial of service attacks. Its a common practice for companys to do so.