Hello,

I was wondering, basically, how to open or close ports, and keep them open or closed.

I'm having to setup a Virtual Private Network with our provider, and in order to do that, I have to have PPTP enabled on our gateway/firewall, which is running Debian 3.0. We can connect to the VPN a few times--or for a little while--and then we're not able to until I restart the 'networking' script in /etc/init.d/ (which may not be good to keep restarting--I'm not sure).

PPTP uses tcp port 1723, so I put this line in /etc/services:

pptp 1723/tcp # PPTP for VPNs

..but that didn't help as far as I can tell.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm really quite new indeed!
Thanks everyone.