Ok, I've stayed out long enough. :-) Marc Chametzky wrote: Marc you might also double check your cabling (in fact even change them). There is no cabling between the two systems. Both LULU and DUSTY are virtual systems running on the same ESXi hardware. You have two (well, three) potential problems here. First of all, since both virtual machines are running on the same hardware, you can get into a probem where one machine don't neccesarily hear traffic from another machine, since they are eventually talking on the same hardware. Second, DECnet, unlike TCP/IP actually requires that the ethernet interface have a specific MAC address, and if you have two virtual machine running, they will require that same interface to have different MAC addresses. Third - is the actual machine running windows, or did I misunderstand something? Windows have a very weird and appearantely unreliable interface for programs that want to talk raw ethernet. And for virtual machines, you do want to talk raw ethernet. But these are all just potential problems. To really diagnose all of this, you'd have to be physically by the machine to test various things. Depending on system, as well as virtual machine, these problems can be solved, but I wouldn't bet money on anything here. :-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol