I have recently got fwbuilder working on my suse 9.1 installation and it works great. Now I want to automate the firewall script so that it loads on bootup. So far I have tried adding the script into the boot.local file in /etc/init.d but when the machine reboots it runs the script before the ethernet interfaces are enabled and so errors saying eth0 does not exist. Is there another way to run this script on startup so that it runs after the network cards have been brought up?

Thanks

Andy

ok -- i don't know about suse but am assuming it is very redhat like ???
if not sorry

first leave the script in init.d and call it firewall or anything else
now there are a million ways to do this
look in /etc/inittab
there are two lines like
id:3:initdefault:
and
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

the best thing to do is to simply make a link in your run level folder (initdefault) in this case rc3.d
cd ./rc3.d
ln -s /etc/init.d/firewall S99firewall
the higher the number the later it starts and "S" means start

another more junky/funky/hacked approach
it says the init file is etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit or whatever yours says
open that file and at the bottom put simply
/etc/init.d/firewall
or whatever you called your script
that way after all the stuff is done it starts the firewall

Thanks for the help mate, I used the none hacker way of doing it you listed. The only thing I noticed is that my default run level is 5, should it be that high? As such I had to put the shortcut in in rc5.d but it definitely loads the script!

Andy

runlevel 5 means the GUI 3 is the text

not sure I understand what you mean, I haven't been using Linux for that long.

yea it really doesn't matter it's kind of arbitrary in a way.....
certain distributions follow some conventions but it makes no difference really
you can set up different run levels to do different things
just beware -- one of them is reboot and one of them is halt
if you set either one of those as default you got troubles

yeah i figured that one out ok lol.
Thanks for the help!

The runlevel structure goes thus

5 -- GUI

3 -- Text

6 -- Restart

0 -- Shutdown

So, init 0/6 is equivalent to shutdown -h/r now

hi,
I just spent a day try to get openSUSE11.0 to load some custom iptables settings in conjunction with the SUSEfirewall at boot. I've got it working now so I thought I'd share:

1. forget about trying to set up a script to run like a service with chkconfig. It just won't work (even with S99!). I suspect the firewall flushes the settings later, after these rc.d scripts are executed, it's not clear how or why the settings get ignored but trust me - they will be ignored.

2. You'll need to edit /etc/sysconfig/scripts/SuSEfirewall2-custom. Put the custom iptables commands where appropriate, details are given in the file itself. Do read what is in the file because there is no man page for this.

3. Editchange to
What I wanted this for was to get postfix to listen on another port as well as 25. Fiddling with postfix itself can produce an open relay and so is not advised. A more elegant solution is to use iptables with the following command:
The three steps above show how I got the custom port mapping rule to auto load at boot. If you don't follow the steps then the settings are lost on reboot - a common complaint.

regards
Matteus Blanc