In reply to:
After poking around for a week, I discovered that my home machine, newray.digex.net, is listed in the Digex's nameservers TWICE! Once with
the
IP address that my home machine is waiting for (199.125.128.5) and once with some other IP address in the digex space (164.109.211.61). If you do an nslookup on the name, you get both addresses. I believe that the technically correct thing for someone to do is to choose one of the addresses at random to distribute the load between two machines pretending to be one. This explains the connection failures that happened half of the time.
This has led me to wonder, though, whether this is some sort of security breech. For instance, could there be someone out there mascarading as me? Normally I run Eudora, Netscape, Telnet and other outward bound applications. It was almost a fluke that I noticed that there were two entries.
More likely this is a matter of someone assigning a host name to a system without realizing it has already been taken. Yes it can be a security breech but as you experienced the connection is broken easily. If someone wanted to grab your identity they would more likely busy your system (by flooding you with ping requests or something similar) and then grab you IP address.
Does some software need to find its IP address in a DNS table? For instance, does Eudora need to look up 164.109.211.61 to find "newray.digex.net"?
The lookup typically goes the other way around, from host--->IP address. Dependant on the cache hits either address could be returned.