> Has anyone considered using IPSEC to create a security association (a la
> tunnel) between the Netview server and the router at the MLM/s location?
...
> This may be more acceptable to the security folk as they can control
> traffic to specific IP addresses and protocol numbers ...

That's actualy the best way to do it. However, since you remove the
responsabiliy of monitoring the content from the firewall your security
people will probably require that you install some intrusion detection on
the box at both ends.