Thanks for all your replies to "Groupware for the Home". I did read them but was switching over to ADSL (lucky me) at the time and the 'switch over' really hasn't finished yet as you'll understand from my plight below!
I have gone over to ADSL with Pipex. The Speedtouch 330 USB modem they sent was a nightmare and I tried and tried to get it to work with Linux but to no avail (tried all the drivers and even started installing new distro's!!).
Finally I had enough and purchased a modem router - ethernet (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X2...).
I had it up and running in 10 minutes and it is a very good, cheap, little gizmo. However now I am using Mandrake 9.2 and I am having connection problems. The modem holds the connection but Mandrake seems to lose the connection to the modem and in order to get things running again I have to enter the command /etc/init.d/network restart - as root. So much so that this command is now a shortcut on my desktop.
Can anyone help here please? I went from Suse 8.2 to Fedora to Suse 9.0 to Slackware 9.0 to Mandrake 9.2 over a four day period and I don't think I can stand another re-install.
In the customer reviews for the product link above it mentions a firmware upgrade - done it - no difference. I don't think there's any point in e-mailing Pipex as the modem keeps the connection. Could this be a problem with DrakFirewall??
Help please.
Rgds,
Martin