Network security is an ever growing need these days. You never know what you’re going to find when you step out into the wild world of the internet. Luckily we’re all using Ubuntu so we’re much more protected than most of the world, but there still is reason to protect our computers and networks.
For those of you that are not behind a hardware router (if you don’t know this might be you) you definitely want to install a firewall for your system. Firewalls can be very simple or very complex, depending on your needs. Now this post will not go into the deepest detail of configuring, maintaining or watching a firewall but I wanted to give some quick suggestions for those of you that might need one.
The simplest desktop firewall that I’ve used on an Ubuntu system is Firestarter. It is very easy to set incoming and outgoing network policies based on port, IP, domain, etc. To install Firestarter you’ll want to do the following:
sudo aptitude install firestarter
Once this is installed you should be able to run the program by running the command firestarter or it should be located in:
Applications > Internet > Firestarter
This program should be fairly straight-forward to configure for your machine. The best policy on an unprotected machine is no-incoming policy. It’s always the safest route to be able to get out but not let anything in. Give it a try. If you run into any trouble leave a comment or check out the Ubuntu Forums for more detail.
Update: See the second half of this tutorial at Using Firestarter.
technorati tags:firewall, gnome, firestarter, internet, network
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