thanks for the help, I've been to Shields UP and all my ports are closed except for 80 and 22, which are stealthed (which I assume means that they are in fact open?)

from what you say about running nmap from behind the router on the external ip does that mean trying to ssh to the external ip from behind the router would also be a pointless test?

No stealth means the port is closed and it also appears to not even exist, ie no reponse whatsoever. That's good in most cases, except here where you want it open. You'll need to adjust your router to foward port 22 to your Slackware PC. You'll also need to open port 22 on any firewall you may be using in Slackware, which there isn't one unless you added it. Anyway, the shields up test should return a status of OPEN after you get it correct.


And no, you may can still connect to your external IP from somewhere within your LAN. I can here, but I'm using a linux PC for my gateway/router vs a DSL modem/router thingy. But like I said, the shieldsup test will tell you when the port is open and at that point your SSH server will likely work without any trouble, assuming you have the port fowarded in your router. I'm not sure how the fowarding works in the one you have but if you are using DHCP on the LAN side to auto assign IPs to your PCs, that "could" lead to problems if the fowarding works off of IPs. Since the IP may change somewhere down the road and you'd end up fowarding the port to a different or non-existant IP. You may be able to foward based on the MAC address though, else switch to static IPs on the LAN side. Anyway, just something else to consider, it will probably not be an issue either way though as you'll usually get the same IP anyway.

its definitely forwarded correctly but I stealthed the ports myself (the modem lets you stealth any ports you like, i've currently got it to stealth all ports)

If I unstealth them then shields up says ssh is open but I still can't ssh to the ip

I don't have any firewall running on slack (its a default install)

Ok, well I don't see how it could possibly work with the port stealthed. A stealthed port by difinition will not repond at all, ie it appears to not even be there.

Also here is a quote from the X5's manual:
So it would appear the modem can not properly handle a packet when you bounce it out and back in, essentially doing double NAT'ing it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but as I said earlier it's best to test it from outside.