Getting Started with Firewall Builder
This article is part of a series regarding firewalling and network security using the Firewall Builder tool on Ubuntu. This is user-contributed content. If you would like to contribute an article, please see the About page for contact information.
Getting Started with Firewall Builder
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Author: vadim@fwbuilder.org |
This guide starts a series of articles about Firewall Builder. Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder) is a GUI firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA) and Cisco routers extended access lists. Both professional network administrators and hobbyists managing firewalls with policies more complex that is allowed by simple web based UI can simplify management tasks with the application. The program runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and Mac OS X and can manage both local and remote firewalls. The first article is an introduction to the program. We will follow up with series of articles focusing on more advanced aspects of it in the coming weeks.
Firewall Builder is packaged with most Linux distributions and is available under “System/Administration” menu.
If it is not there, then it probably needs to be installed on your system. You need to install package that has supporting API library libfwbuilder and package fwbuilder that contains Firewall Builder GUI and policy compilers. Use apt-get or aptitude to find and install them:
# aptitude install libfwbuilder fwbuilder
On FreeBSD and OpenBSD Firewall Builder is part of ports, you can find it in /usr/ports/security/fwbuilder.
Packages shipping with Ubuntu are always one or two minor revisions behind. If you want to try the latest version, you can use pre-built binary .deb packages offered on the project’s web site or build from source using our online installation instructions. Pre-built binary packages can be installed using our repositories of rpm and deb packages, see instructions on this page.
If the system menu item is not there or you have built the program from source, you can always launch it from the command line by just typing “fwbuilder” on the shell prompt:
$ fwbuilder