iptables won't start today

[Chuck Campbell]

Fedora core 1, kernel version 2.4.22-1.2174.nptlBOOT

All was working perfectly two days ago, then quit yesterday.  No reboot, nothing
I can figure out.

I cannot establish a connection from the outside world to our server.
I verified that the port forwarding in the router table is correct, and that 
the protocol (tcp) and port (27500) and internal and external ip addresses
are correct in the router.  All is fine there.

I can connect to this port using the host name or localhost from the 
server machine itself.  I suspect iptables problems.

I did iptables -L and I get:

[root at watchdog rc2.d]# iptables -L

iptables v1.2.9: can't initialize iptables table `filter': iptables who? (do you need to insmod?)
Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.

I did lsmod and got this:
[root at watchdog fed-updates]# lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
8139too                14504   1 
mii                     3608   0  [8139too]
ext3                   61796   1 
jbd                    46412   1  [ext3]

nothing about iptables there...

I tried to start it manually and got the following:

[root at watchdog rc2.d]# ./S08iptables start
Applying iptables firewall rules: iptables-restore v1.2.9: iptables-restore: unable to initializetable 'filter'

Error occurred at line: 3
Try `iptables-restore -h' or 'iptables-restore --help' for more information.
                                                           [FAILED]

Bizarre, because it was working three days ago.  I rebooted the machine and get
the same result.

I looked to see what version I was running:

[root at watchdog fed-updates]# rpm -qa|grep iptables
iptables-debuginfo-1.2.9-1.0
iptables-devel-1.2.9-1.0
iptables-1.2.9-1.0
iptables-ipv6-1.2.9-1.0

I have the following in my updates directory:

[root at watchdog fed-updates]# ls -lart ip*
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 118143 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-ipv6-1.2.9-1.0.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   4699 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-ipv6-0-1.2.9-1.0.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  39810 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-devel-1.2.9-1.0.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   3956 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-devel-0-1.2.9-1.0.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 885193 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-debuginfo-1.2.9-1.0.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   9810 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-debuginfo-0-1.2.9-1.0.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 203260 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-1.2.9-1.0.src.rpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 171617 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-1.2.9-1.0.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   3554 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-0-1.2.9-1.0.src.hdr
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   6152 Feb  4 13:03 iptables-0-1.2.9-1.0.i386.hdr



Help!  I need to get this thing back on line.

thanks,
-chuck