Firestarter

[Jim Kielman]

There is a tool for setting firewall rules installed by default called 
ufw, for those that need a graphical tool to set firewall rules, it's 
just as easy to install gufw, as it is to install firestarter.

The biggest problem is one of education, most users assume that 
firestarter is the the firewall, when in fact it is iptables/netfilter.


I'm still learning how to use mailing lists, I created a message last 
night that only got sent to the the person I replied to, so here goes again.

I'm one of the moderators on the forum, and we are constantly trying to 
educate the membership of the dangers of running applications as root. 
Firestarter needs to be run as root.

This wouldn't be a problem if users ran the program the way it is 
supposed to be run, start it, set the firewall rules, then shut it down. 
Many users start it up when they log in, and leave it run all day,as it 
monitors the firewall and shows blocked connection. Many also assume 
that if firestarter is shutdown they no longer are protected by a firewall.

With the included tool for setting the firewall all you have to do is 
enable the default rule set and it's done. The default rule set blocks 
almost everything,  and in Windows terms makes the users system seemed 
to be stealthed. All you need is one simple command:

sudo ufw enable

And your done. If the defult rules aren't good enough, you can use gufw 
for adding additional rules.