Unable to reach hosts outside my subnet after initial installation

[Edward Lay]

>From: Derek Ragona <derek at computinginnovations.com>

>Check and/or create /etc/nsswitch.conf so you are looking in files and
>dns for hosts.

>Check or create /etc/resolv.conf make sure your upsteam DNS servers
>are listed in this file along with any local caching DNS servers.

Thanks for the suggestion.  Those files already exist with valid
entries though.  In any event, it doesn't seem like a hostname problem
as I can nslookup arbitrary hosts and then try and then ping the IP
numbers directly which fails for hosts beyond the local subnet.  

It seems more like a router/gateway network configuration type of
problem. I've just discovered that when I ping the gateway's IP
address, I get no answer.  Now I know the gateway is functioning as
every other host on the network can reach the rest of the internet and
in fact, I've just successfully ping'd the gateway from the machine
where I'm writing this message. So I'm wondering what could cause this
or at least some way of approaching the problem. 

thanks

ed