I thought I sent this day before yesterday but it did not show up. There was an earlier TIP on setting NIC load order for a multi-homed (2 NIC, SuSE router) to force FW2 to maintain a consistent external interface. Need to set up this machine behind the comsumer grade cable router which has been rooted with buffer overflows several times. Two NICs have different chipsets and modprobe shows each loaded (external is an Intel Pro 100, the other a RealTek). External, for testing, is set with the router default network, 192.168.0.2/24 with default gateway at 192.168.0.1. Second card is set for 192.168.2.1/24, with default gateway of the other card, which (maybe I am wrong, should enable IP forwarding. Behind that is a Cisco 3640 to keep internal network separated (i.e., keep the family's Windows machines away from my stuff). The eth-cfg-%macaddress% files appear to be okay as copied and modified for static addressing from the initial install with only one card in the machine. Route tables also set. Reason I think this is a load order issue is that the external interface works when only it is inserted, but when both are inserted, it appears that I have no connectivity anywhere. If someone can tell me where to set a "force load" statement in some config file, maybe I can move on to other troubleshooting. thank you for your patience. melissa