I am a bit confused here. I have loaded Mandrake 9.0, and have run Mandrake Control Centre as root. In the security tab, I checked "Firewall" and "Shorewall" was installed. A number of checkboxes then came up with the following options:

Everything (no firewall)
Web Server
Domain Name Server
SSH
FTP
Mail Server
POP and IMAP server
CUPS

Checking any of these allows internet access.

I have tried all the HOWTOs which give long and dare I say boring stuff on setting .conf files, but all I want to find out is this (and I can't see the wood for the trees):

As my computer is just a personal computer which I use to connect to the net, and I do not run any services from my computer, can I just leave everything unchecked?

(I do have CUPS installed but not via a network)

DAVE

Yes - by leaving everything unchecked, you allow nothing IN to your machine. If you find that something doesn't work down the road, find out what port it needs and add that to your /etc/shorewall/rules file.

Thanks, Burke!

By the way, one of the things I did learn early on is that you don't need to load any server stuff in Mandrake to connect to the net! My original Mandrake took ages to load, ages to close (and often fell over when closing) and ran slow as hell because I thought I needed NFS, Apache, squid, etc to get on the net. It's often the simple stuff for home users that is harder to find out about!

Dave

in the same configuration, how do I cloise individual ports? a security scan showed that I still have 3 ports open, two tcp and one udp.