To begin with, I will say that I am running Debian Lenny on my Wii. I have tried upgrading but with the extremely limited amount of RAM (which gets exhausted when I try and upgrade with some newer packages) there is not a chance it will work (also 2GB SD card, so limited space).

To the problem.

I was trying to set up openssh-server to run on another port, for example 4444, but when I tried to connect it failed and Nmap showed no open ports. So I figured (may be wrong here, but that is what I have found this far) that I needed to allow port 4444 through the firewall (iptables). But when I try to it spits out "Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-isobel-wii/modules.dep: No such file or directory" and also "iptables v1.4.2: can't initialize iptables 'filter': iptables who? (do you need to insmod?)".

The first error also appears on startup (since I have no GUI, I see the startup). From what I have found over the last couple days, I need to load the "module" and rebuild the kernel, but when I try to get it there is no version for it (its a Wii version though, no surprise). I have checked in /lib/modules/ and /boot/ , both of which are empty, where as I have read there should be some files.

I know I could just default back to port 22 and it would work, but I would like to use other ports for security.

Any ideas, or is it unfixable?

Hey Nano

Just a thought, but if you can remote into the instance over the network (confirming the necessary networking kernel modules loaded), you don't actually need to resolve the question of "what happened to my firewall headers?" as much as you just need to confirm your ports are not blocked (use case is an SSH server, not firewalls on your wii).
If you run an iptables -L and it shows your ports set to accept you can discard the firewall as a possible issue. If the wii doesn't recognize the command... even better, you definitely don't have a firewall running.

Just an added note: If your using the package I found a tutorial for, you will have minimal headers because bluntly, the Wii processor can't handle any more than that. You should still be able to set up your ssh server assuming the kernel has crypto and network headers to support tunneling.