Firestarter closing itself randomly
 

I have installed Firestarter yesterday and let it run for more than 12 hours without problems. However in the last hour or so it would close itself without reason. I restart it and after a few minutes it would close again. I never experienced any such problems ever. I run Linux Debian 6 by the way. Any ideas why this happen?

I would run it from a terminal, and see if you get any output when it does crash.

I haven't seen that before either, but, if you are referring to the Firestarter firewall, the GUI doesn't have to run for the firewall to work. Firestarter is a frontend for configuring iptables. Once you are satisfied with the configuration, you can forget about Firestarter until you need to change your configuration.

if the GUI crashes, how do I verify the firewall works? and how do I know when there was an attack or other event?

I did started in a terminal and these are the messages I got after that with the last one (segmentation fault) that I got when it crashed

# firestarter
Firewall started
Finished reading events list
Segmentation fault

What should I do know?

Honestly, you shouldn't rely on a GUI in linux....
This will list your current config. Look in the normal log files (/var/log) for logging, if enabled.

Sorry for my ignorance but what do you mean by

"Look in the normal log files (/var/log)"

I checked that directory ... is full of files that I cannot read.. how can I look and at what?

The log files in /var/log are typically in plain text except for older files that have been gzipped by logrotate.

You may need root permission to view them.

According to the Arch wiki, Firestarter uses /var/log/messages file.

http://www.archlinux.org/news/firest...slog-services/