When I power on the machine, I can't even ping it, let alone acess ssh/samba/tvheadend/cockpit
That makes it difficult to tell at that point if firewalld is running, or not, but I assume it is, and is blocking everything.
As soon as I login to gnome on the console, then I can start a terminal window and run firewall-cmd --state which says "running",
Also running "systemctl status firewalld" says firewalld.service - firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-10-24 20:27:49 BST; 22min ago
but was it running before I logged in? that "22 min ago" can probably tell me, if I power on but then wait 10 minutes befoe logging in if I then logon using puTTY, and logout on the console, it's still running but as soon as I logout the ssh session, it stops replying to pings, I can't log back in by ssh, so it feels like "something" is telling firewalld that the user is completely logged out now, block all traffic, the only way I can get back in by SSH, is yto get back in via the gnome console first ... very frustrating.
having logged back in again, I can see firewalld.service has been running for 27 minues, so it isn't being stopped and started as I login and out, it's only started when the machine boots.