Chris, you wrote :
[snip]
>We asked the other end to check the connection.  They could connect to our
>system.  It seemed as though the gateway was lost !
>
>So,  reluctantly we restarted the network and magically all was back to
>normal.
>
>Has anybody had a similar experience ?

Yes. We have lost a Gateway before and have used the magic command :

:NETTOOL.NET.SYS "nam;rou;gatel;quit"  (that is gatel with an "L")

to check that the Gateways are active, look under the "Active" column,
and the command :

:NETCONTROL UPDATE=INTERNET;NET=xxxxxx  (where xxxxxx is the LAN name)
to resume service without restarting the Network.

Hope it helps.

Cheers,

John Dunlop

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