Hi guys, I'm a 2 week old linux person.....I'm using mandrake 10 and things are running quite smoothly now(after 2 weeks of hair pulling.) I'm used to using sygate firewall on a windows pc, pretty much it pops up when something tries to access the net you say yes or no and it creates rules etc based on the options you select.

Now i know this is not the case with linux, and i have no issue with having to manually set things up and i do know a bit about networking.

I guess i just need some general info on what i should be looking for, what sort of "phrases" i should google for. Ideally i just want to block everything, and create rules based on what programs/ports i want to open as i need them.

So just some general advice to point me in the right direction of what i should be looking for would be good

Thanks for any help

I believe Mandrake lets you configure your firewall ... through the webmin interface?

the key phrase is iptables... visit www.netfilter.org and browse the docs section.

that would be exactly the info i was looking for, thanks for the info

as for the webmin interface, i dont know about that so maybe i jsut red the docs for now

If you really want to know what your pc is doing, setting up IPTables using scripts/manual editing is by far the best way to go. Hard work, but worth it...

And if you know your way around a network it shouldn't take you that long, just google a lot, and take a look at all the examples here in the forum. Best to go for a "block-all-then-allow" policy as you say, and don't open anything you don't need.

Webmin is good for editing settings, but you should still familiarize yourself with the scripts and how IPTables handles them.

Also, while editing firewalls, it is quite easy to lock yourself out using ssh or web-GUI, so local access is always nice...