Network connections weirdness.

["Daniel J. Brosemer" <odin@bolverk.dorm.org>]

I recently installed (well, 4 months ago anyway) a debian machine (intel)
at work, and had problems connecting to it from outside the building, but
only sometimes (telnet, ftp, ssh, whatever).  I attributed that to
firewall weirdness as there are definately weird things going on on that
firewall.

A couple of weeks ago, I installed slink on a sparc (on a seperate,
unfirewalled segment) and I'm getting the same problems.  It's this sort
of thing:

odin@bolverk:[~]$ telnet penguin1
Trying 198.103.92.132...
Connected to penguin1.glfc.forestry.ca.
Escape character is '^]'.

and not even after an hour or two does it come back... but it connects,
weird!

However, I can telnet to the solaris machines on the same subnet no
problems, ftp, whatever I please.

Does anyone have any ideas?  This is an intermittent problem (Sometimes
network connections work without a hitch).

TIA

-Dano