Looking for a Firewall

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 04 May 2007, Bruce Anderson wrote:

> Now, I have 2 questions, how do you install stuff on a Linux machine?

As well as apt-get commands, there are two nice menu-driven systems for
this.

1. Under Applications, choose Add/Remove.  This will present you with a
   small selection of packages which you can just install.  I don't think
   there's a firewall in here though.

2. Under System->Administration, choose Synaptic Package Manager.  This
   will allow you to browse and select packages for installation (from the
   entire archive set) as well as add new archives (such as universe).
   There are several firewall packages, including firestarter available
   through this.

NB: you need to enable the universe archive before firestarter will be
available!  In synaptic, you can choose Settings->Repositories to do this.

> and can anyone reccomend a good firewall, as I'm a bit gunshy now after
> the smoothwall incident.

Linux has firewalling in-built at a very low (kernel) level.  Any tools you
get such as shorewall and firestarter are basically there to configure the
in-built one.  As such, they're probably all as good as each other from a
security perspective.  Firestarter aims to provide a desktop-oriented
firewall (much like the windows zonealarm type), which sounds like what you
want.

        http://www.fs-security.com/

Gavin