SOLVED (I think) was more traceroute questions

[Emma Jane Hogbin <emmajane@xtrinsic.com>]

Here's the final answer from my ISP on the situation.... Moral of the
story... do NOT add inline comments in your /etc/network/interfaces file.
D'OH!!!

emma

----- Forwarded message from support@ev1servers.net -----
Dear customer,
This appears to have been the result of a misconfiguration of your
server's network settings.  The following shows a section of the output of
/sbin/ifconfig when logging into your server for the first time:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0C:76:62:08:D6
          inet addr:66.98.212.88  Bcast:66.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2167163 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:388376 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:219992274 (209.8 MiB)  TX bytes:143736757 (137.0 MiB)
          Interrupt:21 Base address:0x5000


You'll notice your netmask is incorrectly set to 255.0.0.0 and your
broadcast is also incorrect.  This is causing a problem when your server
attempts to communicate with any other 66.*.*.* ip addresses.  255.0.0.0
is the default netmask for that ip address because it is considered a
"class A" ip address.

I noticed your interface seemed to be properly set up in
/etc/network/interfaces:
iface eth0 inet static
address 66.98.212.88 # 1st from ifconfig
netmask 255.255.254.0 # 3rd from ifconfig
network 66.98.212.0 # 1st from route -n
broadcast 66.98.213.255 # 2nd from ifconfig
gateway 66.98.212.1 # last line, 2nd column of route -n

However, restarting networking on your server did not correct it.  After
looking at "man interfaces" I noticed the line "Lines starting with `#'
are ignored."  I have backed up your interfaces file and removed the
comments.  Afterwards, restarting networking fixed the problem:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0C:76:62:08:D6
          inet addr:66.98.212.88  Bcast:66.98.213.255  Mask:255.255.254.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2170964 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:389885 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:220340242 (210.1 MiB)  TX bytes:143963357 (137.2 MiB)
          Interrupt:21 Base address:0x5000

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]