Hello,

I was interested in running some services (most likely sshd) on my box., which is currently just a workstation I'm in a dorm room, so I don't have the space for a separate firewall box. Yet, I still believe I should have at least some firewall present (as I want to restrict access to only certain hosts). My question is: is it okay(secure) to put firewall filter rules on my box if it's still going to be used as a workstation and server? Also, what would be an example rule I could use to restrict access to only certain hosts (like my friends)? Are there alternative configurations I could use? Thanks in advance.


Lazlo

You have 2 files that are important. The first is /etc/hosts.deny It's easier if you just put this in it:

ALL: ALL

The next file is /etc/hosts.allow This file will allow you to make exceptions to the entry in hosts.deny that says to deny all hosts. Make this file look like this:

ALL: 192.xxx.xxx.xxx
ALL: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

and just replace the x's with the IP number of the friends that you want to allow to login to your system. Easy as that.