allow AIM through firewall

[rafiki_squirrel]

I just got my Red Hat 9 system working as a DSL gateway for my home network. Now I would like to activate a firewall as well. The pretty little Red Hat firewall config tool has just three options...no firewall, medium, and high. If I set it to medium, everything seems to work ok, but I have a few programs that I would like to also permit access to the outside world, most notably AIM and Quake3 (running as an app on the windoze boxen and as a server on the gateway). Any suggestions how I might go about adding permission for these ports to the configuration that "Security Level Configuration" produces by default?

[Dolda2000]

Could you just clarify one thing? Is AIM going to run on the RH9 system or on an internal computer? Do you actually use this RH system as a workstation, or is it just a router?

[rafiki_squirrel]

AIM will be running on both the server and all of the desktops.

[Dolda2000]

To make the internal clients work, I believe that you'll need a SOCKS proxy on the router. I don't think that there's any NAT pass-through code for AIM.

The thing with AIM or any other such protocols for that part is that they use dynamically allocated ports, so there's no specified port that you can open up through the firewall. Therefore, you cannot block any ports above 1024 if AIM is supposed to work.

I don't really understand just what you'll want to use the firewall for anyway. The built-in configurations that come with RH's firewall config tool don't really do anything useful. They just block services that you didn't know that you had left on. Turn them off instead, and you won't need the firewall at all, unless you want something much more sophisticated, ie. that you configure yourself instead of using RH's firewall configurator. You will need rather profound internet knowledge to accomplish something useful, though.