Ok, so it seems that everything is working fine on my server within the network, thanks Matthew. I also touched up the nssock section of my config and added the location parameter. Thanks Tom.
As for telnet - I didn't install it on my system as I understood it to be a security hole. Is that incorrect? Can I do the same via ssh?
James, I have it set up so that Firewall2 in suse only lets in port 8000 for aolserver and 25 for smtp (qmail once I get it all configured) would changing hosts to 0.0.0.0 still make any difference?
Anyhow, I'm fine with the internal setup now. Perhaps you guys could take a peek at this newer thread and see if you can shed some light:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=106341 - actually I see that Tom and Matthew already took a peek and had no problems. Going to be one of those interesting ones...