OK Brett,
I was successful after a few tweaks. Here's what I did:
http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/...all/index.html
That will give you a ipchains based script (or use your old one).
I then used gnotepad+ to do some replacing of the ipchain commands with the iptables commands (e.g. DENY/DROP, input/INPUT, output/OUTPUT, forward/FORWARD, etc.).
Then I took some of the commands that were outlined in:
http://www.computerbits.com/archive/.../linux0002.htm
and placed them near the end of the script.
I saved the edited script as /etc/rc.d/init.d/firewall.
Then I changed my working directory to /etc/rc.d/init.d
and changed the permissions so that the firewall file is executable by all users (not sure if that was totally necessary, but it couldn't hurt).
Then I made symbolic links to that file:
#ln -s ../init.d/firewall S50firewall
for each of the runlevels to that file. So, for runlevels 2-5 (rc2.d - rc5.d), it looks similar to this:
S50firewall --> ../init.d/firewall
For runlevel 0,1, and 6, the link is:
K50firewall --> ../init.d/firewall
Once that was done I rebooted the system. During bootup it showed "Starting firewall" (so far, so good).
Once logged in to the system as root, I did:
#iptables -L
and the output did show that the firewall settings were active. So as far as I can tell right now I'm good to go. I will run it through third-party scanner in a bit.
Prior to that I manually input the iptable commands. When the computer was rebooted all of the commands were lost. That's why everything was placed in the init.d directory so that it would be loaded at boot-up.
Hope this helps. BTW, I'm sure you didn't need the verbose command stuff, but I figured if someone else runs across this it wouldn't hurt.
Good luck!!!