On Fri April 18 2008, max wrote: > Firestarter? what's wrong with the native firewall provided? the native system-config-firewall was not much more than a simple graphical interface for iptables script coding; it offered a smattering of preconfigured services you could enable/disable; it let you trust an interface but with little customization; if you wanted to add custom rules, they had to be in the form of iptables based scripts that you could point to Firestarter is an elegant simple application that offers many more pre-configured services you can enable/disable; it offers the ability to quickly share the connection by asking you a couple of questions and configuring dhcp and routing for you between outside and inside connections; it logs events and provides you the ability to view them and if you spot something being blocked you want let through, you can right-click on the event and get a menu of rules you can enable such as permitting the service, permitting the source, etc... It lets you quickly start and stop the firewall which is very useful for testing. It's not actually my favored firewall app for Fedora but I use it as a personal firewall for individual machines that are already otherwise firewalled from the internet - for machines I put up on the net, I personally prefer FWBuilder, which is a much more robust configuration utility that allows very complex setups and rules with an object/table based GUI configuration system - just downloaded the latest system-config-firewall from rawhide this evening, and it's a big step forward, though still not as robust as the two programs above -- they've added a bunch of new pre-configured services, which is nice and some other capabilities -- I've also used Shorewall which was capable enough - just preferred the other two -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
