On the bright side, it gets the technician to load Linux over W2K, which is a hell of an improvement... (assuming it's a recent version - 7.2 is pretty old like a 2.2 kernel I think).
I would mention redhat but that might be consider impolite, another option is to do a suse upgrade from the latest cd or network install
SSH is a very good way of remotely administering the box - have you tried this?
Or the squid web based proxy admin stuff, having said that you realise that your MAC based security system will break as soon as you have to go via a router to get to the proxy due to the nature of ethernet and ip networking
I'm missing something here though - use MAC addresses for what?
Security, only let your machines (that you know via their ethernet
(Media Access Control) access stuff, it lets you tie a machine to an
access assuming you have well behaved users who don't know about the
"ifconfig eth0 hw ether
The upgrade problem is probably that the SuSE install will still be there and the new one is not in the path, or later in the path so is not being started. Have you tried stopping the squid service then running the newly installed one from its install directory?
I suspect that the suse init scripts (/etc/rc.d/init.d/squid I belive) will be running the old verion of squid that is in /usr/sbin/squid, there are various options but the cleanest of them is a full upgrade to the latest version of suse and then rebuild the squid rpm with your custom configure flags (that I can talk you though) -- Tim Fletcher - Technical Adviser Manchester LEA .~. tim@night-shade.org.uk /V\ L I N U X tim@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk // \\ >Don't fear the penguin< irc: Night-Shade on Quakenet /( )\ ^^-^^ Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.