On Saturday 22 December 2007 05:21:14 am Miles Brennan wrote:
> 2. Does one have to understand IPtables any more (chapter 6)?
> I use shorewall, which seems to me to make this bit of life much easier.
> Am I right in thinking shorewall is more or less the default Fedora
> firewall nowadays?
Shorewall is a graphical tool for configuring iptables (Netfilter) and
is similar to Firestarter. Chapter 6 is constructed to "walk" a new user
through the complexities of iptables and Linux firewalls, so they have
an understanding of what happens at the "packet" level. Shorewall is a
higher level GUI that configures iptables with mouse clicks.
I take your other points.
But shorewall, at least as I use it, is not graphical at all.
It provides 2 or 3 recipes - I use "two-interfaces" -
and then it is easy to open any further ports with something like
SSH/ACCEPT loc $FW
HTTP/ACCEPT loc $FW
in the "rules" file.
(These use macro.SSH, macro,HTTP in /usr/share/shorewall .
There are 20-30 macros for all conceivable services.)