Firewall and/or anti-virus

[GreyGeek]

Nils Kassube wrote:
> GreyGeek wrote:
>   
>> Nils Kassube wrote:
>>     
>>> GreyGeek wrote:
>>>       
>>>> But, if your installation of Jaunty is like mine, a
>>>> firewall was installed and configured automatically.
>>>>         
>>> Strange. There is no firewall automatically installed on my Kubuntu
>>> Jaunty system. And how should the installer know what configuration
>>> would be OK? Can you be a bit more specific and tell us which
>>> firewall package is installed on your machine? Or maybe you are
>>> mixing it up with the fact that the default installation doesn't
>>> have any open ports. But that has nothing to do with a firewall, it
>>> is just the *ubuntu default.
>>>       
>> You are probably confusing iptables with the gui interfaces to it,
>> like "firestarter" or "shorewall", which "whereis" tells me isn't
>> installed by default, since I never installed them.
>>     
>
> Thanks for the clarification. Yes, I thought you meant something like 
> firestarter even though I know that would be merely a frontend for 
> iptables. IMHO iptables also is not a firewall but a tool to configure 
> the kernel to operate as e.g. a router, a NAT gateway or a firewall if 
> you want to. OTOH, if you take iptables as a firewall, it is not 
> configured in any way, the iptables rules are empty by default. 
> Therefore I was a bit surprised when you wrote that there is a firewall 
> installed and configured on your Jaunty system.
>
>
> Nils
>
>   

Then you are probably aware of the packet filtering framework, XFrames,  
inside the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and the fact that iptables is how 
you communicate with XFrames to set up filtering rules that XFrame uses 
to communicate with the kernel.   What many seem to think are 
"firewalls" are really applications that insert a gui between the user 
and  iptables.
http://www.netfilter.org/
GG