I'm VERY new to the linux GUI, and have only been working with the text side for about 5 or 6 months....anyway, here at home, I use internet connection sharing on an XP machine which has a crossover to my RH8 machine. I am able to connect to the web w/ my RH machine, but am unable to obtain search results and some other things. I think it's caused by my firewall being up...but when I try to shut it off with the GUI (under system settings --> security or something), it never works, I have tried making my NIC run in promiscuos mode, but that doesn't work. What's a good way to permanently disable the firewall through the command line terminal?

Start terminal
#/etc/init.d/iptables stop

Followed by the trusty old chkconfig command

chkconfig --level 35 iptables off

to stop it starting everytime you boot

Not too sure if this is the cause of your problem though if your using the default firewall rules that came with it

What sort of things don't work? and XP may not be able to access the internet if you don't have any rules.

well,
when I go to google.com and run a search, it just sits there forever and doesn't time out or anything. the status bar says something along the lines of "sending request to google.com...". also when I try to hit sbc.yahoo.com (to check my email) it does the same thing. My security settings are set to high...I'm at work right now, so I can't try what you suggested...I appreciate your help. let me know what you think