On March 22nd I finally got my Beast talking to my Sony by what I thought was the use of the SuSE FireWall. Last night, because of forcast thunderstorms, I shut down and unplugged both machines. I am paranoid about getting hit by lightening. My house was struck several years ago. Besides all the appliances that were damaged, I saw a really interesting phenomena: ball lightening! It emerged from the wall outlet as a ball about the size of a vollyball and the color of a basket ball, but with a glowing surface. It slowly floated toward me across the dining room while gradually decending. About two feet in front of me it touched the carpet, made a sizzling noise, and disappeared. It created a scorched spot about 7cm in diameter. But, I don't want to go through the hassle of insurance adjustments and out of pocket expense to replace $4K worth of computer hardware when a 5 minutes of personal effort can aliviate any problems. The Sony had not been rebooted since the March 22nd kernel compiles. When I booted the Sony this morning I was greeted with a load of "permission denied" messages., and the eth0 --> dhcp connection wouldn't connect. (If the internet isn't a drug why does a panic attack occur when one can't gain access? ;-)) So, I turned the FireWall off and rebooted. I had IP FORWARD enabled but the Beast wouldn't connect to the internet, so I executed manually: ipchains -A forward -s 192.168.0.0/16 -b -j MASQ and added it to boot.local so it would work the next time I rebooted. The Beast connected again to the www. The firewall is going to stay off until it is better documented. I will be relying on the security of my Ciso 675 router, which has worked very well in the past. I am assuming here, BUT... why would these error messages occur of one turns off the Firewall? Does one have to go to each param and empty it before these msgs occur? Are some aspects of the firewall be turned on even though the firewall flag is set to 'no'? Is this a SuSE bug? JLK ... Enabling IP forwarding done Boot logging started at Sat Mar 31 08:40:46 2001 Master Resource Control: previous runlevel: N, switching to runlevel: 5 /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: /usr/share/doc/packages/SuSEfirewall/EXAMPLES: Permission denied /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: split-brained.: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: ippp0: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: eth1: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: host/network.: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: dmz/intern: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S01SuSEfirewall_init: addesses!: command not found Starting personal-firewall (initial) [not active] unused Initializing random number generator done Starting service dhcp client on eth0 done Setting up network device eth1 done /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: /usr/share/doc/packages/SuSEfirewall/EXAMPLES: Permission denied /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: split-brained.: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: ippp0: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: eth1: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: host/network.: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: dmz/intern: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S08SuSEfirewall_setup: addesses!: command not found Starting RPC portmap daemon done Starting service postgres done Starting SSH daemon done Starting syslog services done Starting service at daemon: done Loading keymap qwerty/us.map.gz done Loading compose table winkeys shiftctrl latin1.add done Starting name server. done Initializing SMTP port. (sendmail) done Starting service kdm done Starting lpd done Starting xntpd done Starting CRON daemon done Starting Name Service Cache Daemon done Starting inetd done /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: /usr/share/doc/packages/SuSEfirewall/EXAMPLES: Permission denied /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: split-brained.: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: ippp0: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: eth1: command not found /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: host/network.: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: dmz/intern: No such file or directory /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S21SuSEfirewall_final: addesses!: command not found Starting httpd [ SuSEHelp mod_perl LDAP contrib backhand ] done Starting personal-firewall (final) [not active] unused ...