I can see out, but dimly: traffic seems to be coming in OK.
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping ebay.com
PING ebay.com (66.135.192.87): 56 data bytes
^C
--- ebay.com ping statistics ---
36 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping mail.apple.com
ping: unknown host mail.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping smtp.apple.com
ping: unknown host smtp.apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=0 ttl=49 time=30.023 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=5 ttl=49 time=30.884 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
8 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 75% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 30.023/30.453/30.884 ms
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
ping: unknown host apple.com
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music paul$ ping apple.com
PING apple.com (17.254.3.183): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.3.183: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=33.125 ms
^C
--- apple.com ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 83% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 33.125/33.125/33.125 ms
Well, things are OK now. It seems I may have some (more) flaky hardware, being one of the NICs in this aging hulk.
The comcast support droid wasn’t very helpful: he did suggest it was a NIC problem, but not from any gift of insight. In the course of the conversation (mostly consisting of advice about deinstalling and reinstalling devices and rebooting), I learned that comcast is “only licensed” to support Windows and Mac OS (version not specified) and only IE and Outlook. If you use Firefox or Eudora (and Mail.app, I suppose), they won’t help you and will point to the unsupported components as part of the problem. I didn’t get into the unlikelihood of needing a license for free software: it wouldn’t have been on the script.
Something somewhere is different, I know, because the address I finally got to stick (via DHCP) was in a totally different range than what I had before (67.x.x.x vs 24.x.x.x). I switched cards (reconfigured them from WAN to LAN and vice versa) and perhaps the presence of different card prompted the DHCP server to actually serve up valid details. I suspect it was an expiration or something that didn’t work: the dhclient.leases file shows an expire time of 20:14 last night. Things worked after that, I know, but nothing from some midnight until 6:50 when I discovered things were not right. Only 6 more hours until service was restored 100% or close to it.
For some reason, local name service (cached) doesn’t work: I have to rely on comcast’s servers. Dunno what that’s about yet.