Iptables not working with RH9

[Derek Storvik <dstorvik@pf.ueo.ohio-state.edu>]

Hello all
  Hopefully someone can see my error.   
I have been running RH7.3 with it's standard kernal version 2.4.18-3 for several months configured as a transparent bridging firewall. We recently purchased a new machine and wanted to install RH9 with its standard kernal 2.4.20( i think)I followed the same steps installed with iptables and bridging utils and used my same script file to setup the bridge with two nics and fill in all my rules. This didn't seem to work right and on further testing realized NOTHING was being filtered. I then rebooted and manualy set up the bridge and cleared all the tables and set the default policy to drop. SO at this point nothing should get through. Well it bridges everything, and the counters in iptables do not increment. The system acts as if it is not there what so ever.

here is the setup after the basic minimal install
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 eth1
ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 promisc
ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 promisc
#bring up bridge with either of the next two commands
ifconfig br0 up
ip link set br0 up
#both do the same thing  namely nothing
iptables -X
iptables -F
iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT DROP

This setup happily bridges packets right on through with no updates to the iptables counters.

I have been experimenting with devil linux as well recently and it exhibits the same problem. 

ip_forwarding is set to 0  as it has been on my working rh7.3 machine I tried setting it to 1 but that didn't help the problems. Im not 100% sure what exactl the ip_forwarding property corresponds to anyway.

any help would be greatly appreciated!
   Thanks
         Derek