The environment:

AMD Athlon-based PC running Slackware 9.1, which provides a variety of network services to other PCs in the house. iptables 1.2.8 playing guardian. Generally speaking, outbound connections are permitted on virtually any port, inbound connections are permitted providing that they're in response to something initiated at this end.

Since this PC runs 24/7 and spends a great deal of time with little to no load on it, I thought I'd install BOINC/SETI and let it chew away at data when it would otherwise be idle.


The problem:

I already have an established SETI account & project key. Without any farting around with the firewall, I have been successfully running a client ported to OS/2 Warp from one of the PCs behind the firewall.

When attempting to attach to the SETI project from the Linux box, the firewall is happily blackholing incoming packets from SETI destined for port #32856.

The easy way out is to open the high ports for incoming connections from the SETI server(s). I'll do this if I have to, but in the mean time I'm puzzled as to why the OS/2 client should have no difficulty with the current firewall configuration yet the Linux client does.

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