I have set up a trustix machine to be used as a firewall running iptables. I have no other internet services running (other than those used by the system) yet I am having some very bad instabilities. The machine will stay on for about 20 hours and then it will freeze solid not even allowing any network traffic (I can't even ping the internal network interface), the shell won't respond, and the hdd indicator light glows pretty much non-stop. However, if I bounce the machine (using the power button) everything is just fine- for about 20 hours. During boot, I have no problems with the machine receiving its dynamic address from my cable modem and I have no boot errors at all.

I am thinking it might be a driver issue with the nic, but am unsure. As far as I can tell in checking with the BIOS, the system is not overheating. I have kept the system at stock clock speeds as well.

The hwconf file contained the following information about the nic:

class: OTHER
bus: PCI
detached: 0
driver: tlan
desc: "Compaq|Netelligent 10/100 Dual"
vendorId: 0e11
deviceId: ae40
subVendorId: 0000
subDeviceId: 0000
pciType: 1

System specs:

Trustix secure linux version 2.2
kernel 2.4.30
EXT-3 file system
AMD K6 @ 500MHz
128MB ram

Thank you for any pointers you can provide.

- Tim

I have seen a similar problem once in a similar setup. The problem was caused by the system logs growing until they filled the available space, thus causing the system to hang.

Check if you have logrotate installed and properly configured.

Firewalls are normally configure to not rotate the logs but send them to an external machine, so I'm sure the syslog is not configured to compress and eliminate older logs.

Interesting. What is the default logging level for iptables and where does it log (I would assume /var/log/)?