So, I'm probably missing something simple here, but I've been scratching my head on this and not getting anywhere. I upgraded my kernel the other day to resolve some ACPI problems and now I can't get networking working properly. I can use either interface, ethernet or wireless, and they both get an IP address from the router, the wireless connects, etc. If I use one another computer on the network, I can connect _to_ the laptop without a problem. But, I can't initiate any connections at all from the laptop.

So, it sounds like a routing problem, but the routing table says:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default 192.168.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

Which is pretty much what I expect to see.

I've tried disabling the firewall without success and I also rebuilt the kernel without IPv6 support on the thought that that may have been responsible.

Anyone had issues like this before?

Have you verified that you still have proper network connectivity when you use your old kernel?

You could try using tcpdump or wireshark to see what is actually happening at the interface.

Tcpdump was a good idea; allowed me to determine that packets _were_ being sent and received by the interface. That ruled out routing and brought me back to thinking of problems with the firewall.

Thus, I have it _partially_ figured out. The problem is the SUSE firewall. I thought that I had ruled that out when deactivating it did not make the problem go away, but it appears that for some reason, shutting down the SUSE Firewall service with YAST also shut down the network service. So, with network running and SUSE firewall not running, networking works as expected.

That still leaves the question of why the SUSE firewall doesn't work with the new kernel, but if I can't get that working, then I can always just configure iptables manually.

Just to close this thread with the final solution, it turns out that IP Connection Tracking was not enabled in my new kernel. Enabled that and all of its options and recompiled and now everything works the way it did before.