Hi,

I'm looking into using a GUI FireWall configurator named FireStarter and would like an opion on it.

It seams ez enough. If you've used it or are just familiar with it, give me your opion on its capabilities or your impression.

Also, it appears that I have to start it up every time I reboot so, being a newbee, what's a good way to activate FireStarter at bootup ?

If you have a suggestion for good firewall security, please let me know .

Thanks ! ..............

it's a good enough GUI, i use it... you don't need to manually start it, there should eb an entry in /etc/rc.d/firestarter which is used to stop and start it each time you boot the machine. it needs a symlink entry in the directory correspdonding to the runlevel you boot to if that is not there, create a link using "ln -s"

Very impressive. Yes, I gave it a really good test drive today and will continue further testing.

EZ setup + you are right, the GUI has a selective "start at bootup", ect....as well as the "hits list" which is interresting.

Thanks for your reply!

You can also check out Firewall Builder at www.fwbuilder.org. It has a GUI similar to CheckPoint's Firewall-1 if you are familiar with that.

If your concerned about security then you'll wanna shut down any services that you don't need running. Just a thought.

Yes, I am trying FireStarter and thought it was closing every port except the ones I chose, but my scans indicated that I had a couple'a ports open. I was able to close them with the GUI.

By the way, I also wanted to try the above mentioned FWBUILDER but I can't seem to get the rpm installed. It bombs out reporting package unknown. I've installed all the dependencies.

Back to the openssh : if I open port 22 for my sftp tunnel, won't there be a security issue with the ssh port being reopened?

much thanks for your suggestion !