Firewall Setup
 

Hi!

First, I would like to say how happy I was to have found this site. As a newbie to Linux I have managed to solve a number of problems with my installation just by reading this forum.

When I initially installed Red Hat 7.2 I could not get Samba working to share files with my Windows boxes. I discovered that it was a firewall (ipchains) problem so I stopped the ipchains service and it works fine. This has unfortunately left me with no protection on my Linux box. I am hoping that if I describe my setup someone can point me in the right direction to getting ipchains working on my network.

I do not wish to have my Linux box as a dedicated firewall. It is simply another workstation on my network.

I have a WIN98se, Win2K and Red Hat 7.2 box on a simple network. They are connected through a small 8 port hub. I also have an ADSL Cisco modem plugged into the hub to provide my Internet access.

TCP/IP configuration on all machines is default. Each box is assigned a 10.xx.xx.xx IP number by the Cisco modem or router (networking is not my forte). Of course the "external" ip presented to the internet community for each of these boxes is different.

I am running Samba on the Linux box for file sharing purposes with the Windows machines. I have also installed wu-ftpd in order to run a small ftp.

I would like to know how to configure ipchains so that my little home network will continue to function properly with samba and also allow for the operation of my ftp while providing me a reasonable measure of protection from the outside world.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

- Mike

well, yuo'd not use ipchains, you should be using iptables, whcih is newer and preferable.

you either need to look over the iptables howto at linuxdoc.org, or find a reliable frontend to a firewall script such as firestarter, using that it's easy to only have a firewall on one interface, i.e. your modem

I installed Firestarter and that seems to have cleared the problem up completely.

Thanks for the reply!

- Mike