hi chris, first of all, i absolutely understand all of your grieve (well most of it), ive been through much of the same. came to the point of contemplating suicide , feeling too stupid to get such a small thing to work etc.... so then i -disabled susefirewall , i personally think it sucks. -found out i had to reenable forwarding (echo 1 > /somefile under /proc/somwhere) sorry not at the machine and cant remember -(after a few other tries for software to kind of 'edit a firewall graphically', they all might be nice but seem to need a full 'gnome' machine which i dont have)installed webmin (last version) which is a web interface to setup a server, and among all also a firewall. tried some things, i guess even then i puzzled about one day, but i got it working!!! read somwhere in this thread about shorewall, might be nice as well, havent tried that. so good luck, and my advice is, drop sf2. it seems to want to be more clever than the user, and i for my part dont like that. Chris Bek <chris001@softhome.net> wrote:Hi there SuSErs... Well I must be doing something really wrong because everything that I do with SuSEFirewall2 is just not working! I have a small network with 5 PCs (all Win9X) and a Linux box (Currently SuSE 7.3) acting as a server. The server is a DHCP server and a Samba server for the entire network. So far everything is working perfect!!! Users log on the network, logon script executes etc.... Then a new task came up: let's input the internet into the network. Configured a 56Kbps modem on the server with YAST. Manged to get my account setup and running. Made a test connection and netscape works great on the server as well as e-mail (pop3). I tried configuring SuSEfirewall to manage all incoming requests from the PCs of the network. The firewall warned me about masquerading etc. so I downloaded the latest version of SuSEfirewall2 from the internet and installed it. Since I only need direct masquerading to be done (no proxies are currently working on the net) I made all the necessary changes as outlined in the examples supplied with the software. Since I needed to have Samba to keep working on the network, I opened (among others) 139 port for samba to work. Double checked all the changes that I have made and run rcSuSEfirewall2 to see what happens. Strange enough when wvdial executes it tells me that DNS is not functioning properly since www.suse.com cannot be found (or something like that please forgive me I am away from the Linux station now). Further on, when I open mIRC or other like programs (winmx etc) from a station, I look at the activity of IPtraf (I check this to see what happens) and I see no connections being created whatsoever.... mIRC prompts me that there was an error trying to find the host.... I have made no changes to the Win9X PCs. Is there something that I am forgeting to do?? I undestand that it is impossible for all of you to react to this since I have no output of the SuSEfirewall.conf file being published to this message.... I understand. Can someone please send me their configuration file so I can see what you have done, on a system that currently is working fine?? In addition, is there something that I have to do regarding route or routing?? What about the Win9X PCs?? Is there something that I have to do there?? I thank you so very much for all your help is advance!!!! I am killing myself trying to figure this one out for about 2 weeks now and managed nothing more than thin air!!!!! Chris Mit freundlichen Gruessen Patrick Thempel mail:patrick_thempel@yahoo.com --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now