intermittent network connection

[nick.cuckson]

I'm having a problem with my network connection when using emerge. Whenever I run emerge it fails to find any of the remote servers containing the distribution files.

My network seems to be working ok otherwise, ie I can ping other machines on the LAN and internet. I can even ping the server containing the distribution files, using the url in the emerge output.

In fact if I ping this server and then run emerge immediately after, I don't see the problem.
When I try to install gnome it takes a long time before the download starts and emerge fails to find any of the servers it tries to connect to.

Can anyone suggest a reason why emerge is unable to get a connection? Is there some config variable I've failed to set?

[turtles]

What does your /etc/make.conf look like? any type'o z?
how about