As many of you know, I've been struggling to get the Beast to reach the WWW via the Sony. There have been major impediments in reaching this goal. First is the fact that even though ip forwarding was set on the Sony, include the '1' stuff, it still wouldn't work. It seems that ipchains doesn't understand ipchains protocol, amazing as that may sound. The install on the Sony started with the default 2.2.18 kernel. I recompiled it to turn off sound (so that I could use the OSS sound) and to enable parport and ppa modules so that I could make the Zip100 drive work. Sound and the Zip drive work well. The ip config settings were default and never changed. ipchains and ipmasq were automatically installed by YaST2 when I installed 7.1 It's disconcerting that, for my hardware, it doesn't work. Well, I've run into YAP (Yet Another Problem). The Beast has an ATPIA CDROM drive, a PleXwriter 8/4/12. For the forth time I reinstalled 7.1 on the Beast. I did so for two reasons: 1) I wanted to install 'everything' and 2) from my readings of what it takes to get the CDRW to burn CDs I have to install the atpia-scsi emulation in the kernel. When I took a look at the /usr/src/linux symbolic link I found it pointing to the 2.4.0 kernel even though I had installed the 2.2.18 kernel. AND, in looking at the /lib/modules/2.2.18 directory I noticed another symbolic link in it that was NOT pointing to the 2.2.18 kernel but was cross-linked to the 2.4.0 kernel. THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT. Basically, when 7.1 installs on my old Sony it slides on like a silk purse (except of the ip forwarding thing). However, getting it to go onto the Beast has been a beast of a fight. It might be worth it to swap the ATPI CDROM for a scsi version and ditto for the Zip250. Another thing I found was that the USB is installed in the kernel even when I have disabled it in the BIOS. SuSE should honor the BIOS settings and not install any software for hardware that the BIOS has disabled. JLK