Upon installing Centos 4.4 a second time it worked "out of the box" as expected. Sorry that I caused a stir over a non-problem. I still have no idea what I did that may have caused dns to fail, I think I made all the same choices and entries the second time around? However doing this in the wee hours I had no interruptions or distractions ... Should anyone be interested the dns servers are: cat /etc/resolv.conf nameserver 12.189.32.61 nameserver 208.67.222.222 nameserver 208.67.220.220 but there may be a problem here: service named status rndc: connect failed: connection refused I'm not certain about that but next is to run yum update and do some other configuration to satisfy my own preferences. Thanks much to all. Bob Goodwin Zuni, Virginia