Sorry if this is an obvious problem.

I have remote access to the (Suse 9.2) server via www-http(port 80) and VNC (port 5800 / 5900), but I cannot connect via FTP, TELNET or SSH.

I have these ports open on both the (dsl modem/router/firewall) device (2WIRE HomePortal 1000HW v3.5.5) and the server. And the telnet, ftp and ssh services are seemingly active in xinetd. Is there a ps-ef|grep * command to verify they are running? Anything else that needs to be activated?

well for these services to be active, their daemon must be running, so you have a few options to hunt this down. One choice is to search process and grep for the name of the suspect dameon such as...

ps -ef | grep sshd

This will show any process that match this name, another interesting option is to use the lsof, such as...

lsof -i

There are a lot of options for lsof, and it can be a very useful tool to get to know.

If you find out that you are not running the apporiate daemons, you will need to start them before you are able to use these services to access the system.

I hope this helps.