[ubuntu-uk] Security on Ubuntu

[Andy]

On 04/03/07, Roberto Sarrionandia <rbs.tito at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Anyone who told you not to have a firewall is pretty foolish,

Anti-virus is only needed if you can't configure applications properly.

Why have the firewall drop inbound traffic? The traffic will only
really do damage if a program is listening for input on that port. Why
have a program listen to a port just to firewall it out. You may as
well not have had the program bind to that port in the first place.

The reason firewalls are common on Windows is that Windows comes with
so much listening to the outside world its hard to turn it all off.

Of course some applications will try to listen to a port, they are
normally spy ware, don't install them in the first place.

of course a firewall is always nice to see if people are trying to
make inbound connections to you.

And of course you could always have a hardware firewall, most (all)
NAT routers provide some level of firewalling (they haven't got much
choice really, it's part of how NAT works).

(having said all this I have Firestarter configure IPTables, just in
case I stupidly install a daemon.)

Andy