iptables-retore very slow

[Rackage | Randles <randles@rackage.com>]

Hi,

I recently noticed that one of my firewalls was taking a very long time 
to reboot. Which was odd as its a very new  machine.

On investigation is seemed to be the iptables-restore command that was 
adding 10+ minutes to the boot-up times.

I ran iptables-restore from a terminal and found that it was indeed 
taking an amazingly long time.

Obviously I assumed it was related to the rules on the server, so I 
flushed all rules and all user defined tables from the firewall (nat, 
mangle and filter) and used iptables-save which took less than 1 
millisecond :) on the empty rule set.

However iptables-restore is still taking 10+ minutes even with no rules 
to read / apply.

Has anyone seen the behaviour before?  or has anybody got some bright 
ideas on how I might continue debugging this issue?

Thanks in Advance

Regards

Ben