Strange NAT Behavior

["Anthony R. Vallario" <avallario@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To all;
   I've got a CentOS 4.2 box configured as your standard nat firewall. 
Nothing fancy, nothing new. Of course logwatch is on and configured to 
report about the day's previous activities. After looking at these emails 
from logwatch I noticed something funny. There were entries from where the 
firewall was blocking my LAN pc's. Huh? That's right. I went thru 
/var/log/messages to confirm. Sure enough, there are logged events from when 
one of the LAN pc's was blocked from going to say yahoo, adobe or google. 
Weird thing is, it's random. Ports are random to.I can't make heads or tales 
out of a pattern or reason why. So why on earth would a nat firewall with no 
outgoing drop rules all of a sudden block these lan pc's? Oh one more thing 
of note. This same nat firewall (text file with the rules) was used on a 
fedora core 1 box about a month ago. No issues with random outgoing blocks.


Anthony R. Vallario