Firestarter - Wireless card - Ethernet nic -- Entangled problems
 

There are probably more questions here than question marks, and some of them belong on other forums, but let me start here, then I'll expand on issues not clarified in other threads.

I've been experimenting with Firestarter and Guarddog. Have settled on Firestarter mainly because I'm a Gnome believer. Today, I managed to compile and install a driver for my RT2500 wireless card on my Debian system. (No ndiswrapper, thank you.) After all that, there are some dangling issues.

Both eth0 and ra0 (the wireless card) are configured to initialize at boot. Since, normally, they're not connected at the same time, there is no interference. If I booted for some reason with both connected, would that be likely to cause a problem?

Firestarter seems to remember which Network device was last used, and won't start automatically if I boot using the other device. I have to 1st go into Gnome Networking and 'Accept' the active device, even tho it's already connected to the internet. As soon as I click 'Accept' there, it engages immediately. I wish that didn't happen.

Eth0 is first to attempt a connection in the boot process. It takes a long time deciding that there is no network connection. It would be nice if I could hit an F key or something to tell it to move on to the next step in the Boot script. When it's ra0's turn, it fails immediately if the wireless card is not there.

In the process of working with Guarddog and Firestarter, the iptables rule set seems to have accumulated lots of new ones, evidently generated by both Guarddog and Firestarter. iptables -L shows a real mix and match. On the other hand, I think that when Firestarter initializes, it uses only it's own rule set anyway, ignoring what was in iptables before it started. Does that seem logical? If true, I think I want to just get Firestarter's rule set, make that the default to iptables, and not run Firestarter at all, unless I want to create some additional rules. I could probably read a little bit, and figure out how to get those rules installed in iptables, but Firestarter doesn't seem to display or print those rules. Only the ones I've added.

Anyway ... that's enough ... Any comments or instruction or suggested sources of information about these issues would be appreciated.