I HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH A RH8.0 SYSTEM FOR OVER FOUR MONTHS TRYING TO GET IT UP AND WORKING TO PROVIDE FIREWALL SUPPORT WITH IPTABLES AND NAT SUPPORT WITH MASQ. EVERY TIME I GET MASQ UP AND WORKING, REBOOT THE FIRST TIME AND GET MAJOR SYSTEM ISSUES. GNOME REPORTS THAT IT CAN NOT WORK WITH A SPECIFIC DNS ENTRY. UPON REBOOT THE SYSTEM BECOMES VERY SLOW AND REALLY NOT USABLE AT ALL! THE DOCUMENATION FOR RH8 THAT I HAVE FOUND FROM RH IS VERY POOR!! I EVEN PAID $60.00 TO JOIN THE RED HAT NETWORK IN HOPES OF GETTING ACCESS TO OTHER ADVANCED DOC'S. HAVE YET TO FIND ANY QUALITY DOCUMENTATION!! MOST OF THE DOC'S SAY HOW SIMPLE IT IS, BUT YET FAIL TO PROVIDE DETAILED INFORMATION ON HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENT A RH SYSTEM.

VERY FRUSTRATED!

Sounds like you've got a lot going on there... To pin point which part of your system is causing problems, set individual components not to start with the system, and turn each one on one by one to see what introduces the slow down. Start by disabling iptables: 'chkconfig --level 2345 iptables off' and maybe ipchains, too: 'chkconfig --level 2345 ipchains off'. Provide a copy of /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf so that we can take a look... DNS problems often make a system appear as though it is slow, while the system attempts to resolve IP addresses to names and visa-versa against an invalid name resolution mechanism.

I was able to resolve the problem this weekend. The problem appears to be with Routing. The default route was pointing at my internal NIC. After deleting the route and adding one back for the EXTIF and stopping and restrarting the Ext NIC, every thing worked fine. I am purplex at why I had to stop and start the Ext NIC. After adding the correct routing entry and stopping and restarting, the routing entry that I added was modified and pointing to my Cable Modems GW. The route entry that I added was to ROUTE ADD DEFAULT DEV ETH0. My understanding is that this should have sent all traffic to the ETH0 interface. Anyway... Thanks for your help!!!
Don Davidson