Firewall with Ubuntu

[Sandy Harris]

Rashkae <ubuntu at tigershaunt.com> wrote:

>  The previous poster, was, unfortunately, giving very misleading advice.
>   Ubuntu install with no firewall whatsoever.

Right. Iptables is there but in the default setup, it is configured to accept
everythng.

>  That's not quite as bad as it sounds, because Ubuntu also installs with
>  absolutely no services or software configured to accept connections from
>  the network, ...
>
>  All Linux firewalls, to my knowledge, ultimately, are front ends for
>  iptables.  ...
>
>  If, however, you are more interested in getting a perfectly suitable
>  firewall for most common home and small office up with no fuss, I would
>  suggest installing firestarter.  This gives you a simple to use GUI to
>  configure the firewall.

Also consider putting a router of some sort between your network
and the rest of the world, set up as a firewall. This protects your
whole network and reduces the load for firewalling on other
machines. Of course, you should still try to set all machines up
to be secure, but this makes errors there less risky.

It is not really all that hard to build a router out of a scrap PC with
two ethernet cards, but for much less hassle, buy one from
Dlink, Linksys, Aloha or any of a half-dozen other companies.
Most are little Linux systems, running on an ARM or some such,
with a built-in firewall function based on iptables. They are cheap,
and dead easy to administer.

-- 
Sandy Harris,
Nanjing, China