all, continuing the debian saga, I'm trying to download Packages.gz from: ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz and am consistently getting timeout errors. Native ftp consistently gets timeout errors as well. Curl seems to work fine, but I can't assume curl on some platforms that I maintain (os390) so I was wondering what the issue might be. The timeout is on the RETR command. Ed