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Thread: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

  1. #1
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    Question To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Im thinking of installing Firestarter http://www.fs-security.com/ on my Ubuntu 10.10, do i really need it I have my Linksys router & its running dd-wrt is this enough? Thanks in advance.

  2. #2
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    If you 're worried about open ports, use canyouseeme to check your router for open ports. If you don't have any ports forwarded, you shouldn't see anything open.

    I've been behind a router for over 7 years, and and have never had a firewall enabled on computers on my internal network, except for Windows systems which enable the firewall by default. I've been running one XP system with the firewall turned off for about a year as an experiment, and I haven't run into any problems with it so far.

  3. #3
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    2 part answer. The first part is to say, no, you probably don't need a software firewall on the computer itself if you're behind a router and have no servers running and no ports forwarded. The second part is to say that if you do decide to use a software firewall, Firestarter is not really a good option as it is no longer maintained and ufw is already there (with perfectly fine default settings once enabled). Just do this:

    Code:
    sudo ufw enable
    and you're good. But as I mentioned in my first point, it's probably not necessary.

  4. #4
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Don't use Firestarter.

  5. #5
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Thanks everyone for all the replies, no ports are open on my router so im gonna go with no software firewall.

  6. #6
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Firestarter is no longer being maintained. UFW is the firewall I would suggest. However...

    You probably don't need a firewall. Unless you install a service (web, mail etc) then there are no listening ports for the forewall to protect. And then if you don install (for instance) a web server, you would only have to reconfigure the firewall to let connections through to it anyway. You only really need a firewall if you want to install a service and you want to restrict who can connect to it.

  7. #7
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Apart from the added security that a firewall has the potential to bring, there are some firewall solutions that bring more dimensions to that realm as well as becoming a router & speeding up (to some degree) your internet throughput.

    The modem/routers that most people use to access the internet via broadband are Windows centric. Windows apparently doesn't handle the packets of information sent via the internet as well as the Linux kernel based systems do (I'm sure that BSD is better than Windows also). So you can improve your data throughput to some degree by using a standalone Linux kernel based firewall/router.

    Just how much better throughput is extremely hard (for me at least) to measure. Though I do remember that when I first setup IPCop over 2 years ago I thought that my internet speeds had improved.

    I have no proof, & barely any memory of the situation after 2 years.

    Anyway, it is just another dimension to add to the firewall/(router) topic. Beyond which I can only say that IPCop has a number of services built in & that can be added in various ways for those that have need for them. All of which is easy to find out about via a web search, for anyone that is interested.

    My measurements tell me that my standalone headless PIII IPCop system costs me $54-/year in electricity.

  8. #8
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    Question Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    I have Maverick 10.10 running a netbook. UFW prevents me from browsing Windows XP workgroup shares on my home network. I would like to leave UFW turned off all the time.

    Problem is, sometimes my kids might take the netbook out of my house.

    Please excuse my ignorance, but how unsafe is it to use a wireless netbook at places like McDonald's or Starbucks with UFW turned off?

  9. #9
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Provided that your children have their own accounts with 9 character passwords and do not use your account and they do not have super user access, then you need not worry about it.

  10. #10
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    Re: To Firewall or Not to Firewall, need Opinions......

    Quote Originally Posted by jbrown96 View Post
    Don't use Firestarter.
    I agree. I've been using it for ages, and it constantly floods the syslog files with 'garbage', and also stops outbound, for ???? reason/s. I have to go into Firestarter, edit prefs (no changes), and then it comes good again.

    I'm going to change over to UFW.

    Oygle

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