Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

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A Linux Firewall for Average Users

For the past two months I have been using Linux (Fedora Core 2) as my primary desktop environment. It has been a trick finding applications to replace the ones I used on Windows. Among them was a free firewall applications from ZoneLabs called ZoneAlarm. Trying to find a similar one on Linux has been a pain and doing command line configuration via ip tables isn’t fun. One of the better applications I ran across is called FireStarter. I have been using the stable v0.9.3 version for some time and have not been very happy with it due to many bugs.

Today, I ran across the v1.0.0-rc1 beta version and I came away saying “wow”. This application is finally something that is really equivalent to the ZoneAlarm app I used in Windows AND is less cluttered as well. The application is really just a GUI interface to the underlying ip tables firewall but nevertheless the simplicity and elegance of the interface simply took my breath away.

The main application consists of three tabs: “Status”, “Events” and “Policy”. The “Status” tab has a list of all active connections for the system with port numbers, IP addresses and process names, which I REALLY liked since in ZoneAlarm only program icons were shown. In a way it was similar to the “netstat” command. There is also a list of network interface with STATISTICS!!! The “Events” and “Policy” tabs contain a list of blocked connections and firewall rules respectively and are very simply to use. There is also an easy wizard used to configure the firewall AND NAT capability similar to Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) in Windows. All of this in a package less then 1 MB in size and a window 1/4 of a normal screen! I love it already.

I really like this program, especially with the extra bells and whistles that appeal to the inner geek in me. And, even though this is a beta release, it feels much more stable and cleaner than the 0.9.3 “stable” I have been using until now. I am impatiently waiting for the final 1.0 release.

P.S. Did I mention that it’s open source (GPL) and free!!!

Tags: firestarter, iptables, Linux —

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