First of all, I am not sure if the above assumption of mine is correct as I don't find any sense in it.

I have just installed Firestarter in Ubuntu 5.04 through Synaptic. I connect to the internet through wired LAN by D-Link DSL-G604T Wireless ADSL Router.

After it detected several intrusion attempts (connecting my PocketPC through SynCE is one of them), my internet connection would freeze for sometime (15-30 min). And not only for this system, all other systems connecting to the router would experience the same interruption.

Basically, everytime I were to sync my PocketPC to my system, the internet of the whole network would be down for a while. Even I disable the firewall. (btw my PocketPC would not even connect if the firewall is on)

Restarting the router, rebooting the system, shutting off and even uninstalling the firewall does not help. I am not sure which of the (or the combination of) above actions actually resume the connection.

The firewall settings were the default, I did not mess with it.

Its not the first time that I install Firestarter but it is the first time that I experience internet connection interruption like this.

What is happening here? What should I do?

Thanks for reading.

Is there a way for you to keep running the firewall but switching off any intrusion detection program you might have running ?
Maybe you have already done some tests to see if you can find the bottleneck. A good try might be if you experience the same problems when you are connected through a wire. The first thing i'd try is try out different variations and see when the problems occur.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Firestarter is sort of a front end GUI for controlling iptables. It is pretty simple and there isn't much for me to play with except setting rules by allowing and blocking the specified ports or ip address. And that's about all, so there is unfortunately no way for me to turn off this sort of anti-intrusion measures.

Also the network parallysing occurs even when I disabled the firewall.

From some source that I verify, SynCE uses port 990, 5678 and 5679. I have set some rules for the firewall to ignore these ports but it doesn't make a difference at all, PocketPC still can't connect when firewall is on.

After some more testing, I am able to let the PocketPC connect without the internet shutting down. But I can't control it or see any pattern whether the firewall would get mad, if I were to see some red coloured access in the event log GUI, that's it for the internet.