ipf stopped working on 5.3

[ray at redshift.com]

At 01:12 PM 10/26/2005 -0400, John Fitzgerald wrote:
| Another strange symptom is that if I ipf -D and then ipf -E -f
| /etc/ipf.rules, my terminal (I'm remote) will freeze and I'll be forced to
| power cycle the server, after which time it will come back up (with no rules
| running). I'm assuming that after the ipf -E -f /etc/ipf.rules somehow the
| firewall stops all traffic since apache won't respond to web requests
| either.
| 
| As a side note, I did put the sshd server listening on an obscure port so it
| should take awhile for the bots to find it. The ipf.rules I left at 22 as a
| testament to it not working. However this obviously isn't a permanent
| solution as I should be able to get ipf working.

after you make changes to ipf.rules, you should restart ipf like this:

ipf -F a && ipf -f /etc/ipf.rules

-F will flush your old rules, whereas ipf -D will disable ipf.  Try the line
above and see if your SSH session remains active after you make changes, etc.

Ray