A user comes up to me and asks why he cannot work with mirc and winmx. I checked with the linux-e group and they told me that I have to launch SuSEfirewall.

This is i good idea to protect yourself, but the only thing you really have to do is to activate routing between internal and extrenal nic and to masquerade your private ip's. echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward if the kernel setting relating to this are activated.

So since I read that there is a newer version out, I managed to download SuSEfirewall2 and managed to get iptables as well. Installed both, configured SuSEfirewall2 configuration based on a setup that a SuSE user sent me. I execute SuSEfirewall2 --test, and I get the following message:

Found named running, trying to execute Forward_DNS (I am away from the server now, so please bear with me....) A few moments later....

Trying to Forward_DNS. Found named running but no DNS server to forward.....

I executed rcnamed status and found that rcnamed was not running.

I am still trying to understand what is going on.... When I sit on a Win9X PC, I try to ping www.suse.com, but nothing happens!!!

Can someone please help me with this? It is the only thing that is left for me to do and I still cannot understand what to do; perhaps because I am such a newbie with SuSE and Linux... Who knows?!?

As i saw in /sbin/SuSEfirewall that the script guesses named is up if the relating entry in the rc.config is set to yes. Try to disable "auto detect services" and activate samba and dhcp for internal nic using: FW_SERVICES_INT_TCP="" # Common: domain syslog FW_SERVICES_INT_UDP="" check etc services and /var/log/message for related ports (to check /sbin/SuSEfirwall seeking for dhcpd and samba will show necessary ports, too) The UDP 53 (DNS) request should get routed+masqueraded by your box. See tail -f /var/log/message while sending such a request to the outside. Maybe this helps Yours Michael