Well, you learn something new everyday I guess. I have had a problem with my DSL for several months now where it will drop in and out, sometimes dropping for 30 minutes. I have called SBC’s tech support over and over again to no avail. Occasionally they are able to tweak the line to some degree, but not enough to triumph over the problem. It was always like putting a band-aid on a wound. I called so many times that I just learned to have the first level tech support guy (in India usually) transfer me to the line department directly. So after this went on for several months, the connection dropping, me calling tech support, them fixing it temporarily, I finally got someone that knew something I didn’t know (something that may help the rest of you on a DSL connection if you ever have this problem). The guy at the line department said that looking at the logs on my connection he could tell the problem was more than likely an issue with my line filter. What was more astonishing (and I didn’t know this before), the guy said it’s a good rule of thumb to hook your modem’s telephone line directly to the wall jack without a filter but to put filters on every other telephony device in the house that lies on the same line! I did that and I am seeing significantly less errors in my firewall logs than I was before. However, I’m not holding my breath because this same type of thing has happened before where it appeared the issue was fixed and then it failed over and over again. I’m not understanding why they give you filters that have both a computer jack and a telephone jack if all you’re filtering is your analog voice connection. Anyway, what really amazed me and proved to me that was indeed the problem is that yesterday, when the connection had dropped for about 30 minutes, I called SBC (again), and upon learning that vital piece of information I had my wife take out the filter for me, and bamm: it connected instantly. So it seems this may have fixed it … so if you have a DSL line, you may try hooking your modem up directly to the wall, just so this never happens to you 😉