Having trouble setting up my firewall

[clearski]

Alright I tried the same rules after I uninstalled and reinstalled UFW and GUFW. They still didn't work. I want to try using iptables, but the tutorial I used wasn't clear about where the finished script should be saved. So for the time being I've decided to keep the firewall off.

If you are not hosting any server on your machine, as others said before, you should allow outgoing connections and block incoming ones which are not a response to a session started by one of your applications (which ufw does by default, unless the rules were altered).

See this thread because I've had the same questions, too:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2137243&

The last message explains how to reset ufw and set it to default rules, though I would now add allow outgoing firstly, then deny incoming. You don't even need gufw, because the firewall once enabled is loaded at every startup.

I also assume that you're behind a router. My router has a firewall, does some filtering, so if it's properly configured, it should do a good job for basic networking (browsing & email). Everytime I check the logs of the router I see how great it does in blocking & filtering. It is very important how you configure your browser (what it can or cannot do, there are some great add-ons which IMHO are really necessary) and what you visit and click after you're alone out there.

[HermanAB]

Hmm, note that you don't really need a firewall script. Firewalls are mainly there to protect Windows machines.

[Dural]

If you are not hosting any server on your machine, as others said before, you should allow outgoing connections and block incoming ones which are not a response to a session started by one of your applications (which ufw does by default, unless the rules were altered).

See this thread because I've had the same questions, too:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2137243&

The last message explains how to reset ufw and set it to default rules, though I would now add allow outgoing firstly, then deny incoming. You don't even need gufw, because the firewall once enabled is loaded at every startup.

I also assume that you're behind a router. My router has a firewall, does some filtering, so if it's properly configured, it should do a good job for basic networking (browsing & email). Everytime I check the logs of the router I see how great it does in blocking & filtering. It is very important how you configure your browser (what it can or cannot do, there are some great add-ons which IMHO are really necessary) and what you visit and click after you're alone out there.

I intend to do some testing of my web page on my computer. That would require instaling LAMP. Would that count as running a server?

[haqking]

I intend to do some testing of my web page on my computer. That would require instaling LAMP. Would that count as running a server?

any machine which provides a service is a server, and yes it would be a web server