Thanks a lot for the useful comments, I did it, got the old pentium with smoothwall and everything is going fine (almost everything). With my new setting I needed to change several network parameters on each of my home network client machines. I want some of the clients to get network info through the dhcp server of the firewall machine and I want to leave one client machine as internal server with static IP. This is possible with smoothwall. The firewall machine also is a dns server. My problem: I haven't been able to get dns to work. Im using YaST for all network configuration on the clients. For the ones configured with dhcp I set a hostname and a domain and in the dhcp options I set hostname to send = AUTO. For the internal server I give an ip address (out of the range of the dhcp server) a hostname and the same domain as for the others. All with the same default gateway and same dns server. I know the dns server is modifying the etc/resolv.conf in my client machines since I see a etc/resolv.conf backup dhcpd generated file. My questions: What could be wrong? Is there a mechanism in SuSE that re-writes the etc/hosts file? Im asking this just because Im trying to delete some entries (from my old network setting) from this file but everytime the file comes up again with the old ip address and hostname im trying so vehemently to delete! Why I cannot ping my internal machines by their hostname? Sorry to be quite vague at this point but I can give you more details as the thread goes along. Thanks again for your help, Felipe.