Firewall oddity

We switched over from a windows 2000 server for a gateway to a redhat 9
box, all updates.  I am using a firewall tool called narc.  I've tried
others but with the same effect.  Before we switched over to linux we
could connect to our mail server(located else ware in the US) w/o
noticeable delay.  Now that we are going through the redhat box there is
about a 10 second lag to connect to the server.  This wouldn't be such a
problem, but we have some people here using imap.  None of the dns
servers have changed or the line itself, the only difference is the OS
of the gateway.  Any idea what could be causing the slow connection to
the server?

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Steve Dixon
Web Developer
Innovative Ideas Intl.
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