This is exactly why it pisses me off when manufacturers do this crap. Take the easy route and piss in the face of customers who did not drink the M$ kool aid.
Well, I got my own rant on that.
I used linux for several years. Started out with the CLOS distro (Corel Linux Operating System). Then Corel either went belly up or quit supporting it. It was a Debian port, so I switched to Debian. Tried lots of others including the old Red Hat, Mandrake and several others. But I grew familiar with Debian and stuck with it. I think I finally quit using it when Sarge went stable and Etch was still in testing. I still got a couple CD's around here with the Woody NetInstall image on them.
But over the 6 years or so that I used it, I had just as many, if not more, problems with linux as I had ever had with Windows. Including several apt-get upgrades that went tits up, crashes due to incompatibility with hardware, applications with more bugs than a warm August night, and myriads of problems with KDE (never did like Gnome because it looked like something slapped together by a 4th grader).
I finally quit using it because I reached the realization that 99% of the applications I needed to use to get my work done are written for Windows. It's the applications that make the computer useful - not the operating system underneath it all. I decided that this "OS War" is more of a religion than anything else. It might make you feel good, and even maybe superior to the Heathens that use Windows. After all, you're one the Chosen Few when JFC descends out of the clouds. But that don't make it practical.
So when somebody uses linux (Ubuntu - whatever - Ubuntu is just another Debian port) it's expected that what you do is spend most of your time trying to get stuff to work. And bitch about it when a company writes a piece of software or builds a piece of hardware that's not supported. That's what linux users do. They think every company should support it. But it's a business decision and few companies give a rip about Computing Religious Beliefs.
When it comes to servers, et al, linux has pretty much replaced the old Unix operating systems like Solaris. It is the defacto standard in server applications. But on the desktop Windows still rules, and likely will for some time to come.
</rant>
In your network router, reserve a IP block outside of the DHCP pool for static IP's. Assign your Classic a static IP address in that reserved IP block. Shut down the incoming power to the Classic, then shut off the battery power to it. Turn on the battery power and let it boot up, then turn the incoming power back on. Then delete or rename the com.midnitesolar.LocalStatusPanel folder that you'll find in the Application Data folder in your user account, fire up the Local Status Panel and try it again.
It could be a problem with the DHCP server in your network router (yes, most of those network routers run a linux kernel) and the way the Classic gets a DHCP lease. When the lease expires and the Classic tries to renew the lease, it might not be getting one so it drops off the network.
Once you have a static IP assigned to it, if it stops communicating after awhile you can ping it to see if it's still active, and you can even telnet to it on port 502 - the Classic will answer a telnet call.
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Chris