Here’s something interesting I found when installing SimplyMEPIS 7.0 (beta) on my home office network. The install went very well and thought everything went without a hitch until I tried to connect to the server from the other office machines and from the outside world. I’m doing this to learn how to set up a Linux web server and host it from my office, now that I have a Verizon FIOS Business plan with static IPs. So my first try is to host my own site, jimplumb.com. I had an install of Ubuntu and it worked sort of okay, but I reinstalled this mepis and I couldn’t get to the computer, through ping or anything. Google is still your good friend when it comes to debugging stuff like this and I googled “can’t ping server mepis” or something like that and a page that came up mentioned Guarddog, the firewall. I looked into guarddog and found it was divided up into local and internet settings. All the internet settings were okay, so I looked in local and alas, there it was. Nothing was allowed, no ping, no http, etc. I enabled the things I needed and badabing, all was well.