Alright I installed Firestarter and I have it booting up on boot (using sudo like the FAQ tells you). My problem is when using the sudo command it tells me it can't find iptables.

Should I edit the PATH of my username to include the path to iptables? What would be the safest way to get iptables recoginzed?

Anybody know anything about this? Any work arounds? Maybe another firewall?

CrEsPo...hi,

Make sure iptables is indeed installed.Firestarter is just a front end for it,so it wont install iptables.

Hey ironwalker, nice to see you here .

iptables is installed, the thing is it's only accessible by the root user, which I think is causing the problem. I tried Googling, but I have found nothing. I think I have to get some better Google skills or something.

Firestart installs so that you must type admin password first before it opens....at least thats how it is on my system.
Did you install firestarter from your pakage repository or from source?

The Slack package on the Firestarter page didn't work so I compiled it myself from the source.

It doesn't ask me for a password on startup so I'm guessing I'm missing something when I configured it.

The site's documentation say's nothing on this and their compile instructions are:

"./configure --sysconfdir=/etc
make
su
make install"

I remember when I fooled around with Firestarter on FC3 it did ask me for the root password.

On the Firestarter documentation they tell you to edit '/etc/sudoers' with the following command 'username ALL= NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/firestarter' so you can use Firestarter as a user. When I run Firestarter without this command it gives me an error telling me I need root privileges and closes. When I run Firestarter with this command it starts up and gives me the iptables error.

Right now I'm running Firestarter using 'kdesu'. I would be fine using 'kdesu', but the problem is if for some reason my computer decides to reboot I'm stuck with no firewall running.

I found a fix for this though a new problem:

For some reason there is something starting Firestarter besides the manual command I entered. So I have one firestarter which starts up without root priviledges (so it shuts down) and one that starts with root priviledges (stays open). I want to remove the first one I mentioned since I did not add it and it's useless as I have a working startup happening.

By the way, my fix was to add /usr/sbin to the PATH in ~/.profile so iptables is recognized. Is that a smart thing by the way?

Not sure about the double-starting for Firestarter. I used it a while ago but now I just use iptables manually.

If you're unclear on this, the sudoers addition just means that 'username' (to be replaced by your user of course) is allowed to use sudo, but that the command firestarter can be run as root without prompting for a password.

About /usr/sbin in $PATH. I just copy root's path to my own user path for ease of use; there's no problem doing that.

Thanks for the confirmation .

Yeah right now I'm wondering if I should of just tried to learn iptables manually instead of fooling around with Firestarter. Though for now I guess I'll use Firestarter and next time I have to update Slackware I'll probably learn iptables manually. Shouldn't be to hard, I hope :P.

One thing I do find really useful about Firestarter is it wil tell you all your system's connections, which service its using and which binaries are making the connections all from within X.

As for learning iptables, it's quite complicated but there are lots of good resources. If you feel like shelling out 9$ US I recommend: Purdy, Gregor N.Linux iptables - Pocket Reference, O'Reilly, 2004. It's 83 pages long, and full of almost everything you need to learn iptables for any home user.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll keep that in mind. I usually like purchasing books so I'll probably get it at one point.