Firewall builder guide how to#

Lokkit is not for the ace admin with a large complex network to protect. Lokkit is a decent choice for a personal firewall. You can still use traditional init scripts with Debian, or try out the newfangled method see /usr/share/doc/iptables/examples/oldinitdscript.gz and /usr/share/doc/iptables/ more information. It remains in whatever state I want it, up or down, regardless of whatever networking craziness might be happening. I prefer to keep networking and iptables separate for easier debugging, and having iptables come up at boot means I don’t have to worry about introducing an additional potential point of failure. While I’m always game for good new ways of doing things, this one has me puzzled. Debian 3.1 does away with init scripts entirely, and now wants users to control iptables with ifupdown, so that iptables comes up and down with the networking interfaces. Red Hat and its derivatives, and Debian and its spawn, make iptables way too complicated with large tangled scripts. However, there is a rather steep learning curve, and the various Linux distributions do not make it any easier.

The netfilter/iptables package is an amazing construct, and very effective. It filters on any of the fields in IP, TCP, and UDP packets, which gives the ace admin great flexibility and packet-filtering powers. Netfilter/iptables is the basis for the vast majority of Linux-based firewalls. There are gazillions of the things, so today we’ll look at three that I think are pretty good: Lokkit, KMyFirewall, and Firewall Builder. With a firewall building utility you can get a functioning firewall up and running, and have scripts and rulesets to study.

Firewall builder guide how to#

But learning how to do this is the tricky part, so this is where firewall builder programs earn their beans. I believe that any network or system administrator who wishes to maintain an iptables firewall should learn iptables well, and be able to easily whip up a basic firewall from scratch.