I use an adsl router to connect to the internet. My machine is connecteed to the router via ethernet. The interface it uses is eth0. The router has a firwall on it already and it is enabled. The router also has wifi on it that is anabled and secured useing wpa encryption and password etc. I use dhcp to assign the ip address.

I installed guarddog as a firewall gui so I could enable and configure iptables. On the protocol tab I selected the things I wish to be able to connect to the internet e.e.g http, https, bit torrent, ftp etc etc. I left the ones dotn want alown. I copied exactly the same allow and disallow things to the local section of the protocal tabs so the internet and local match.

When I enable the firewall everything is blocked, I cant even get standard http access. I enable the boxes for dhcp and applied the settings again, this still did nothing. I followed a guide in Tuxmagazine for setting up the firewall but this still stopepd all network activity.

When I disable guarddog I can access my router for the internet without any problems.

Is there something I need to enable in guarddog to allow this machine access to the router?

Secondly I used firestarter a while ago when I was ona dial up connection. Is firestarter pretty secure by defsult in its standrd configuration, or does it not have any pre-set config options and that i need to configure it after the install.

Help with the guarddog problem would be appreciated

Michael

Have you read the howto that comes with Guarddog.

Basically, Guarddog uses Zones to define its rule-sets. Local refers to the local machine itself, and Internet is anything else. In the Protocol tab, you need to select "Internet Zone" and then tick the boxes corresponding to the protocols that you want to access in the Local zone column. Do the same for the Local Zone, ticking the boxes in the Internet Zone column.

With regards to Firestarter, both Guarddog and Firestarter are graphical frontends to IPTables. Both have a "deny by default" policy, which means that if something is not explicity allowed, then it is denied. Firestarter is more user friendly than Guarddog, but Guarddog seems to offer more control.

I hope this helps
--Ian