wOOkie,

Thanks for your response. I was wondering about the license issue as well, and I admit there are some license issues on the network that I need to address. However, as I have continued to dig, I have spoken with our local Novell support consultant, and he is informing me that the persons who are "in the know" on this product are finding that it is having trouble managing stateful inspection filters. Supposedly the more stateful filters you have set up on the firewall, the quicker the performance will eventually degrade. Sounds kind of crazy to me that that would be the issue, but I did add another rule to my firewall Monday afternoon, and it was Tues. AM that things started to go belly up, so maybe there is some credence to this. The concerning thing to me is, if this thing can't consistently do stateful packet inspection, it is of little use to me. The consultant is suggesting changing the "lower priority" rules to a stateless inspection configuration, which I do not want to do. I am seriously considering moving to another product to take this headache away once and for all. Again, thanks for your help and ideas. I wanted to pass this information along to see if anyone else has heard of this being a problem with BM?

Have a good one

Russ