Hi,
I think, I also had the same problem just today. I was using the SuSE 6.3 Firewalling/Masquerading script, but the firewall 1. did not quickly open connections for/from clients 2. listed the firewall rules very slowly (seemed to hang after "rcfirewall status")
At first it seemed to me as if this was only a name service problem (this box also has a DNS server running). After I simply added more name servers in resolv.conf and restarted the firewall it worked fine for the first few minutes...
At present I let the clients use the squid proxy, which works fine, and plan to return to a simpler script, which was in use before ;-)
Try to disable nscd and see if it changes.
killall nscd, edit /etc/rc.config, /START_NSCD
Thanks,
Roman.
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| Roman Drahtmüller