Hey everyone,

Besides doing a paper on Slackware Linux VS Free BSD I also run two Slackware machines here at home, and well, besides wanting to have a cool discussion for the front page, I'd like too see how others do it at well.

So, how do YOU Secure your Slackware boxes?

I am still searching for a good firewall / front end to IPTables, which I've yet to find. Anything I find seems to want X loaded. Well I don't.

I don't always use X on my Slackware machines, and firestarter, shoewall, and most others either want KDE or GNOMe loaded to work. Firestarter I've used and found it easy to set up, but having to have GNOME loaded the whole time is just annoying. When you switch to Runlevel 3, it dies. And won't run in it.

So what is a good firewall you've found that works without X? I'd like to find something like the application Firestarter that will continue to run when I take down X.

I've just found something called GShield, which I'm looking at right now, and hoping it's actually good. There seems to be a real bad low amount of firewalls made for Slackware, and most of them are crap.

SUSEFirewall2 remains the best firewall I've seen for Linux, even though it is just a front end for IPTables, but at least it stays up when you shut X down.

Currently, I use Swaret, which before that I just used wget for my patches, and other than that I have nothing really in place but a hardware firewall. The only problem is, if I pop the box in my DMZ, poof, unprotected as hell.

I have been looking for a GOOD paper on IPTables, but the ones I find are very boring, very long, and not very informative. I've never used IPTables directly, and even though I'd like to, I haven't got the time right now to actually sit down and learn them.

This is a side effect of me working two jobs, going to college full time, and in the one day a week I get off, I have to do homework, and do things here at home, so I haven't had much time. Which is why I'd like to get a decent front end for IPtables so I can allow, say, SSH, Apache, and FTP through, and when I'm not using those, have all ports closed.

I've been trying to talk Pat into making a firewall for Slackware, but I haven't gotten a reply. Maybe SUSE will make a port of SUSE Firewall2 too Slackware. I have yet to find anything better. It has an easy to use interface, but also has a lot of advanced stuff to set by hand as well.

So has anyone here found something decent? What firewall do you use for Slackware?

Ig I could pick to change something in Slackware, I'd take out ProFTPd, and replace it with PureFTPd, I'd put a Firewall like "slackwarewall", something like that in it, and I'd make Postfix the default over Sendmail.

Heh, maybe one day I'll finally get good at C or ASM and make a tool for Linux called "SWAT" which I could say means "SlackWare Admin Tool". Damn I'm good with marketing lol.

Anyway, Please, don't reply saying you have some Windows firewall you like, I want this to be a good clean thread with some humor, and a lot of information. If you find something or use something really good, and you want me too, I'll add you to my paper and give you credit for finding it. I'm obviously going to talk about anything I find that I like, and if you want I'll add you in there.


A few minutes ago I found a bit in one of my books how to get IPtables going very easy, but of course it didn't work.

iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s 0/0 -d MyPrivateIPForSlackwarebox -p tcp \ --dport telnet -j DROP



I tried that but it says that the --dport is not valid. So like, does anyone know what is valid? I've looked at that command and it seems too me that a good guess is dport would be destination port, -i is interface, -p would be port, and -d would be destination. I'm only guessing here though.