A firewall configuration GUI
User space | Advanced By Marco Marongiu
Online on: recently published
Have you ever wanted to configure a personal firewall for your GNU/Linux box, but were scared of the complexity of iptables? Well, I might not be able to make you a security expert, but I can show you a tool that will help you to configure your personal firewall the easy way. The secret? Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder
for short).
Firewall Builder is a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows you to configure a number of firewall engines in many different environments. As of version 2.0.9 it supports these firewall softwares:
- FWSM
- ipfilter
- ipfw
- iptables
- PF
- PIX
and these environments:
- FreeBSD
- Cisco FWSM
- Linksys/Sveasoft
- GNU/Linux (kernel 2.4 and 2.6)
- MacOS X
- OpenBSD
- Cisco PIX
- Solaris
Obviously, if I had to talk about internet security in general and about all possible uses of Firewall Builder on all the possible platforms, I’d be better off writing a book. Therefore, I’ll focus on a specific case—configuring a “personal” firewall (that is, a firewall that protects just the one computer it is running on) on a DHCP-configured machine. I will create the basic configuration with a wizard and add some customisations afterwards.