Whilst I was pretending to study, Steven Grunza wrote:

> My standard by-pass for this problem is to drop into a shell before
> installing, rename ping to ping.original, copy ls to ping, and then proceed
> with installation.

I tried this, but there isn't enough space on the virtual disk to do this,
using a sybolic or hard link to ls didn't work either, as the system
doesn't seen to use the stuff you can play with in the way you'd expect..
if there was a link called ping in /sbin then ping would be called...the
_real_ ping, not ls-instead-of-ping, which confused me somewhat :-) It
seems that the compiled in code takes preference to the *system* that is
running in the virtual disk-space... how on earth this works is far
beyond a non-programmer like me...in fact the way this seems to be working
doesn't gel with anything I've come across..I'm stumped! :-) Unfortunatly
this means I'm still stuck at the I-can't-get-past-the-pinging stage of
sysinstall and am highly frustrated... Any help will be greatfully
recieved!
 
> The way this appears to work is sysinstall calls ping (in reality ls) and
> checks the return code.  Since ls works ok, the install generally continues.
> 
> Steven G
> 
> At 07:12 PM 4/18/00 +0100, you wrote:
> >Hi all,
> >
> >I am trying to install an Alpha 3000/300 via ftp, but when I get to the
> >network configuration sysinstal fails as it doesn't get a response when it
> >pings the gateway box. I dropped into the /bin/sh shell and found that the
> >config works ok, but as the gateway in question won't reply to pings (it's
> >a bug not a feature and the replacement is months off at best) is there
> >any way that I could skip the tests? If not it might be an idea to have
<snip>

Again, sorry for the long post.

Have Fun,
Jim.
-- 
James McBoyle
    J.F.McBoyle@brighton.ac.uk | "There is no spoon." Neo, The Matrix
    JimMcBoyle@vikesfan.com    | "Spooooooooooon!" The Tick, The Tick