Science and Technology : Building a Firewall

[anAfrican]

Building a Desktop Firewall

"By now, many internet users know that they need a firewall to protect their computers while they're online. Knowing that doesn't convey the knowledge of how to create and maintain a firewall. A nice GUI firewall builder called fwbuilder makes it possible to set up a working firewall in ten minutes--on Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Dru Lavigne shows how it works on FreeBSD. Aug. 3, 2006"

OK, truthfully, this might still be a bit tricky on/for the Win32 platform as it is a port from the *nix world. Also, sadly, for the Win32 platform, there is a 30-day trial version that might be re-installable after the 30 day period but would require completely cleaning all traces of it out of the windows registry.

I haven't actually tried this on XP, yet, and my thoughts to test this today have just been sidetracked. In this morning's cursory look at it, it seems that this might be better for building the firewall rule set and transfering it to a suitable router (Linksys WRT54G can have it's ROM flashed with a linux based firmware that would make an excellent "firewall device").

I'll take a gander at this more closely as soon as possible. I have been putting off reworking my Linksys router into the firewall that it could be so this could be a good opportunity for a "community project"/"class"?

 

[nibs]

both mac os x and windows (xp and later) ship with firewall. i use shorewall on my linux servers.

if your computer is behind a router and not connected directly to the internet (dsl/cable modem) you probably don't need a software firewall as most routers have hardware firewalls, and the machines aren't directly exposed to the network anyway.
if you share broadband in your home with a router, only the router is directly exposed to the network.
you may want a firewall if you are on an open wireless network and cannot trust the people that have access to your wireless network.