I have a SuSE 7.1 server (I know it needs to be updated however...) it works fine in my Intranet however I also have an Internet VPN set up that works fine as well for all of my other devices (I have a fairly large home network) however the Linux server refuses to acknowledge any connections other than from within the local Intranet.

It is a basic setup - is not running as a router and has a static IP address.

The VPN and firewall NAT the address to the same network as the Linux server but it simply will not recognize any connection that is not originated within the Intranet network range. Also verified that the VPN, Router and Firewall are not the issue.

I have traced, scoped, and trapped the connection attempts. If the connection originates inside the Intranet, it works fine - if the connection originates outside of the Intranet, it refuses to work at all - I have even had a Network Engineer look at this from the IP side and he could not see any issue or problem from the network side - it is very weird????? It simply will not respond to the connection request on any layer.

The Linux box is not running any firewall or security software - it is running Webmin and everything else is vanilla - other than a few compilers I have installed (sourceforge stuff).

I would appreciate ANY thoughts, suggestions or comments.

I am not a Linux expert but I have been in IT, software development and network architecture for about 20 years - not a novice - I have seen many strange things - this is the strangest!

I know there is an answer - probably a DUHH sort of thing but I have been chasing this for several months now - oh well!

Thanks in advance
Dave

to me, this just sounds like you've not got a gateway set on the machine. what does "route" tell you about the default gateway? i'm not familiar with suse's config file structure, but to add a gateway adhoc "route add default gw 192.168.0.254" or whatever your gateway ip is. also distinguish between being able to ping internet IP's and hostnames.

Thanks for the quick reply - I checked the route - it has the correct gateway address (I use a 172.20.1.0 network with the base router set at .1 - it also has a couple of static routes I added to make sure everything is covered.

I added the public addresses and I am rebooting now to see if that helps.

Still no success - I can see the connection getting to the Linux server through the network but it does not answer. Is there some program (debug, internal comm trace type thing) that would show me from inside Linux what is happening to the packets?