Hi, i've passed by alot of posts regarding this matter, but none are specific enough to my problem (or are they?). Please dont laugh, i'm new to linux.

i have a Mandrake 8.2 Firewall that stands between my home LAN and the internet. The internal ip is 192.168.0.1 and it is fully updated.

problem #1 - ssh

i am trying to use PuTTY to open an SSH root session on my firewall. i installed all the packages that have 'ssh' in their name, and when i try to connect, i get a message "Connection closed by remote host." if anyone can shed light on this, it would be helpful.

problem #2 - port forwarding

i would like to use VNC to connect to my Win2k box inside my LAN from school. My friends at school have accomplished this (no firewall) so i know that the problem isn't between the school and my firewall. i know i am supposed to use iptables, but how?

Thanx in advance.

Is the 'sshd' daemon running? 'ps -aux | grep sshd'
What port is sshd listening on?
Is your firewall forwarding to port 22 on your internal machine's address?

As for iptables - it's a pretty in-depth topic. You can either start drilling on google for HowTo's (tldp.org would be a good start) or have a look at sourceforge for some GUI firewall configuration tools. And yes, of course we can't forget about the man pages.

Drake migh also include packages for iptables configurtation.

I toyed around with firestarter a few days ago http://firestarter.sourceforge.net/

It's not too bad...I still like the ruleset I wrote better...but it'll get you a pretty decent script up and running....easy to setup port forwarding, denying hosts/ports. Only problem I found is that the program would crash sometimes. The script would stay loaded and do it's thing...but the GUI frontend would lockup and need to be killed. You are still protected even when that happens. Pretty decent little toy. I do like the log analyzer feature built into it (shows you "attacks" on ports real time). It was enough to keep me with it for a few days....but then I had to flush and reload my script :-D

Sebastian

wow, that firestarter program really fixed my port forwarding problem. thanx