Fedora Users — Re: Easiest firewall?

John Fleming wrote:

Was the consensus Shorewall??  I tried the archives to no avail.  I want to
open the standard stuff like www, ftp, ssh, named, pop and smtp, and some
ports for Webmin and want to block the rest.  What's the easiest for a
newbie to start with?  Thanks!  - John

Shorewall in my opinion is excellent, really powerful features that i haven't even started to explore yet and no need to have X loaded on the firewall (Sounds silly but some people run everything on their firewall which is not very secure).. If you want a gui to manage it use Webmin which has a shorewall module..

Talking about Webmin, it has an IPTABLES module so if you like you can construct your own firewall from scratch..

Then there is SmoothWall or IPCop.. This is a firewall distro with a web configuration interface.. On tiny hardware I have found SmoothWall to run faster also SmoothWall is far more actively supported since it is related to the commercial SmoothWall security products.. IPCop is a fork of SmoothWall and from what I can see IPCop has stagnated in the last year..

Finally there are the gui frontends to secure a workstation.. These are fine for doing just that but I wouldn't use them to protect servers or a network..

Later..