Inward Bound

There's a Boston customer I have serviced for many years now. They run Unix, so there's never much to do (we Unix folk have less work than Maytag repairmen), but some years ago I had put in a small Linux server just so that some of their order entry folks could ssh in from home and then telnet to the SCO box that their app runs on. That's been chugging along for many a year on a DSL line. Recently they decided that they needed faster Internet access and their own mail server. That seemed like the ideal time to upgrade the Linux server and install internal firewalls; that is, I have the hardware firewall forwarding the ports I want inward but at the Linux box I also specifically both disable and block all ports not being used. So, on the day of the switch-over, I brought a hardware firewall and Suse Linux CD's. I first configured the firewall from information provided by FW_SERVICES_EXT_TCP="ssh smtp" to /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2, restarted the firewall (/etc/init.d/SuSEfirewall2_init restart) and tried again. Still blocked. Arrgh. OK, maybe there's something wrong at the firewall. I reconfigured it to send 22 to my laptop's IP and opened ssh on it. Nope, that didn't work either. It was starting to feel like it was time to check with Conversent, so I called and explained what was happening. *Originally published at Del.icio.us | Yahoo! My Web |