Hi,
you can't assign the IP-Adress x.y.z.255 to a host. In most cases this is the broadcast address of the network x.y.z/24. The log messages indicates a deny for broadcasting to port 138 - which is usually NETBIOS-Datagrams.
Broadcasting is a common mechanism to send IP-Packets to all hosts in a certain network. As far as I know, NETBIOS uses broadcasts to build the browsing lists, elect the master browser and so on... I'm not very common to SuSE-Firewall but the log message indicates the denial of NETBIOS-Broadcasts - which is not a bad idea - as most people don't want to let NETBIOS
Assigning the network address or broadcast address is almost always a very bad idea. Sine most LAN's are now based on C classes this means .255 and .0 should not be used for actuall host IPs. through
their Firewalls.
You should NOT let SMB through your firewall, in or out (ports 135 to 139). The reasons: well letting it in means attackers can probe your windows machines easily, letting it out means windows clients can inadverdently give away information like username and password.
The question is - indicates this log message the event, where the machine hangs - or was it just coincidence? Which service generates NETBIOS-Traffic (SAMBA?)... Kind regards
Samba will generate broadcast traffic if configured to do so. If you wanna stop all the broadcasts (stop the insanity!) setup a WINS server and setup all the clients to use it. A lot of network appliances will also do broadcast traffic to find out who/what exists on the LAN, also some network control programs will do it.
Marek Stiefenhofer