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Easy, free, high-quality firewall for Linux.


ghost's Avatar
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What would a really easy, free, high-quality firewall for Linux be? Which firewall would you recommend to anyone who doesn't know anything about iptables and/or doesn't want to configure their own firewall?


ghost's Avatar
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Most distro's have iptables wrappers built in. Mandriva definately does anyways. No idea how good it is. don't bother with them guess my router must do most of the work.


ghost's Avatar
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I've been using and reading about Linux for a long time now, and I've never come across a free firewall that's like the free firewalls for Windows… An easy, GUI firewall that's extremely high quality… except for Firestarter. I don't know that it's the best firewall you can get, but it's the only one that's similar to the free firewalls for Windows. I don't know much about SmoothWall, but I don't think it is. It's strange to me that no one makes one.


ghost's Avatar
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Solutions obvious. Use windows.


ghost's Avatar
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I just tried to. It lasted about a month. I like Linux. ;)


ghost's Avatar
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Tried it once, Linux sucks. Can't even run messenger.


ghost's Avatar
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You can't run the program… you can use MSN Messenger. From the Pidgin FAQ:

How do I use AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk/Jabber/XMPP, ICQ, or any other protocol? ¶

Use the Account Editor (Accounts->Manage Accounts) to add the account of the appropriate messaging service. Use the checkbox in the account editor to enable the current account.

For Google Talk, fill in the Domain field with the domain of your Google Mail e-mail address. For most users this will be gmail.com or googlemail.com, but Google Apps for Your Domain users will use their domain instead.


ghost's Avatar
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Lol, so I give up my top my professional quality OS for something cheap and crappy with less features? what about Office? What if I need to make a professional quaility ppt openoffice impress can barely handle presentations which would embaress a gcse student.

Yeah I don't see it. You get what you pay for which linux that's usually nothing.


ghost's Avatar
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I don't know the details of Office documents, but I know there's a lot of support in OpenOffice or whatever else is used. EDIT: I've been using Linux for quite a while as my main (or only) OS, and I'm not missing anything that I need… but I'm not a professional and I don't need to have anything that's available for only Windows…


ghost's Avatar
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BaburuBoburu wrote: I don't need to have anything that's available for only Windows…

How's that search for a Easy, free, high-quality firewall going?


ghost's Avatar
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It's very easy to get everything for Linux, except a Windows-like free firewall. Unless SmoothWall or something along those lines is like that. Compared to ZoneAlarm or Comodo or any free firewalls like that for Windows, there's not much of a selection for Linux. I'm surprised there aren't any because there are a lot of firewalls. Pretty much everything else is very easy to find and use on Linux and is very quality. I don't want to configure my own with iptables, I want one that works like the free firewalls for Windows do. I don't get it.


ghost's Avatar
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Tbh i'm just trollin' with that linux shizzle. What distro you looking at? I garantee you there will be a decent easy to use interface for iptables.


ghost's Avatar
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I would like to know a lot about what I'm doing before I configure things or even have something else do it for me if there's any complexity to it… I just downloaded iptables documentation and a tutorial. I've just been wondering if anyone knows of any Windows-like firewalls. MoshBat: I was trying Windows again, after more than a year of using nothing but Linux and I got tired of it real fast. It's old to me, and boring. !


ghost's Avatar
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What is the basic function of AppArmor, the software Ubuntu uses? I saw a short description of it before but I remember nothing useful about the description. EDIT: If you don't want to explain, I can google it… but do you think it's a big boost to security?


spyware's Avatar
Banned
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arno-iptables


stealth-'s Avatar
Ninja Extreme
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Okay, first of all, it really depends on what your wanting to use this firewall for, OP….

If this computer is a home computer behind a router, installing a firewall is going to do fuck all. This is one of those things that windows has made ignorant users think that they "need" it to be safe, when it really does almost nothing.The router naturally drops all unassociated incoming packets, and any rootkit can change the firewall settings anyways to make it fit what it wants. Any software that gets onto your user account could also easily keylog until you logged in with sudo or su, and boom then they have firewall control anyways.

On a home system, if you really don't want a port open, remove the relevant service or remove it from autostart.

If this is a server machine that is going to be doing the firewall job that the router usually does, then you should be taking the time to learn the in's and out's of iptables, because it's a really handy and straight forward utility once you get the hang of it that is available and identical on almost all distributions of linux.


ghost's Avatar
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I believe I have plenty of protection right now. I've just been wondering about free-Windows-firewall type firewalls other than Firestarter. Also, I wanted to point out that when I thought of AppArmor, I was thinking of OpenSUSE. I'm not sure what all Ubuntu does for security by default other than no open ports.


stealth-'s Avatar
Ninja Extreme
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Well, in the case I've had the best experience with Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw). It comes pre-installed on ubuntu machines, is easy to control from both the command line and GUI, and is similar to windows-like firewalls. The GUI client isn't pre-installed, however it's just an "sudo apt-get install gufw" away.

http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/firewall-ubuntu-desktops/ <- Ufw from command line https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gufw <- Gufw, graphical ufw controller

It won't do that zone alarm "Annoy the fuck out of you till you just click "accept and remember" all the time" thing, though. If your looking for something like that, I'm don't know of any linux project like that of the top off my head.

If your interested being security paranoid, I'd recommend running a "chkrootkit" every once and a while, or installing a host based IDS. Those are less user friendly, but also cool projects to mess with. Their much simpler than iptables, and well documented with tutorials on the net, too.

As for what Apparmor is, it's an alternative to SE Linux that does pretty much the same thing. It's job is to restrict programs to what they can and cannot do based on profiles. It has some benefits over SE linux, such as file system neutrality and being easier to configure, but I'm not fully familiar with how in depth ubuntu utilizes it.


ghost's Avatar
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I posted that I was mistaken… I was thinking of OpenSUSE. It uses AppArmor. For some reason I was thinking Ubuntu has it for a minute…


stealth-'s Avatar
Ninja Extreme
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BaburuBoburu wrote: For some reason I was thinking Ubuntu has it for a minute…

Ubuntu does have it. Either way, though, everything I said is still correct and applies to OpenSUSE too.


ghost's Avatar
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Hmm… I thought Ubuntu had it, too… after I posted that, I googled some and couldn't find anything about it. Thanks for the advice.