Firewalls for Linux

[jr05linux]

I have used slackware around 2 to 3 times but i have never really needed a firewall it seemed pretty well secure for what i needed to do. As almost all linux is.

[IKnowNot]

Gore said

Not a hardware firewall, or a "Linux Firewall Distro" Just a firewall you installed on a Slackware box and found to be good. The ones I find are usually just a front end for IPTables or something like that, which is fine, but they are also usually crap.

Don’t know about “crap”, but just not flexible enough and just as hard or harder to learn then learning to write the rules by hand ( i.e. learning IPTables ) ... but then I’m a masochist and write my HTML ( now XHTML ) by hand too! If you can write the rulesets yourself you can use it on any distro.

pooh sun tzu said

I use iptables as the ip packet filtering process (firewall) and firestarter as the front end gui configuration.

Looks interesting ... thanks, I’ll have to experiment with it when I get the time.

lumpyporridge said

isn't IPFW available for linux?

To my knowledge, not since kernel versions 2.0.* .
see X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV

Last time I checked though, IPTables was able, if set up for it, to use old IPFWADM or IPChains rulesets. I have never tried it though and recall seeing somewhere that this may not be supported in the future, but I could be wrong on this.


Anyway, why would you want to revert back to IPFWADM or IPChains for that matter? IPFWADM had limitations on the protocols ( from Linux IP Firewalling Chains

The older Linux firewalling code doesn't deal with fragments, has 32-bit counters (on Intel at least), doesn't allow specification of protocols other than TCP, UDP or ICMP, can't make large changes atomically, can't specify inverse rules, has some quirks, and can be tough to manage (making it prone to user error).

and neither is Stateful.