I am running SuSE 9.1 Personal.

Apparently, after recent YaST updates of iptables and SuSEfirewall2, I started seeing various errors at system startup. These all occurred during the firewall initialization (phase 1 of 3) after the initialization of the "lo" interface (127.0.0.1/8) and before the initialization of the actual network card (eth0):

• iptables: resource temporarily unavailable
  iptables: Chain is not empty
  iptables: Chain already exists (if this appears, it repeats 5 or 6 times)
  sbin/SuSEfirewall2: line 617: kill (2612) no such process

Please note I am not Linux-literate.

When this first occurred, I brought it down to run level 1 did an iptables -F (flush), -Z (zero), brought it back up to run leven 5 and the errors did not appear. Upon rebooting the PC afterwards, the errors returned.

It had been suggested force-installing iptables and SuSEfirewall2 via YaST online update, this was done (had to change the icon to "update", in order for online update to download/install), and it did not remedy this afterwards.

As I am not Linux-literate, I have generally reformatted and reinstalled Linux when something goes wrong and I am unable to fix it. After reformatting and reinstalling, also downloading all available updates as well, this problem still occurs.

Any thoughts as to why these errors appear? On the surface, it looks like iptables is supposed to be clean (empty?) when the system starts up, but the files are present.

I can get online though without any problems, but are the above errors actually something to worry about?