I felt this deserved it's own thread. The user=no modem problem is over and the winner was ecogeek. His suggestion maybe was overkill. But it has worked in a toned down form. Anybody want to look at what I did here:

First tonight I tried markus' suggestion of chgrp dip /etc/resolv.conf. Nada. Then I looked at resolv.conf and it was a link with no permissions. AHA. It linked to etc/dhcpc/resolv.conf so I thought I would outsmart it and did chgrp dip /etc/dhcp/resolv.conf. No joy.

Next on to eco's suggestion. It was his email I was reading when I let loose the great coffee flood of 2004 on my computer kingdom: chmod 777 /dev/ttyS0 I decided to go rooting around the ol' dev folder before letting loose with this nugget. I found something odd and hoping someone here can explain. ttyS0, 1 and 2 - the permissions were zip, forbidden across the board. While ttyS3-6 were read&write for root and group (dialout). None executable. So instead of shooting for the 777 I just changed ttyS0 to root & group read & write and it worked. Ok, now what have I let loose? If kano had these things forbidden he must have had a reason, the modified date on these character device files were much more recent than the other ones. Dare I ask him? Or is this pretty much OK what I have done? I do intend to do a fresh install. I have been ch modding all over the place and I am sure I have done other nasty things and probably shouldn't been on here on this until I make a new one all nice and secure. But not forbidden

Oh the keyboard is looking pretty good, drying in the hottest room in the apt and doesn't smell of coffee, sour milk or rust yet. The mouse is bigger trouble. I am sure it is fine but getting the scroll wheel assembly back together is proving difficult. Anyone have a link on them to a assembly diagram of a logitech optical wheel mouse