Dear Experts,

I have couple of machines having public IPs on it and running mail, database and IIS servers. I want to get them behind the linux firewall. how can i do that?

Thanks

Saif

Your best bet is to use iptables (part of the kernel). There are many firewall config utilities, including Guarddog and Firestarter which will configure iptables for you.

The fact they have public IP addresses is irrelevant, as the firewall does not know the difference between public and private IP addresses.

Can you provide us with more info, and then we can help more specifically.

--Ian

well, you could buy a linux router/firewall such as the Linksys WRT54G and then use its simple web interface to set things-up, for example... essentially you'd just need to set it to do port-forwarding (public IP on the router's external side, private IP on the router's internal side, private IPs on all your servers)... but depending on what functionality you expect when you say "firewall", you might be more interested in using a regular PC with multiple NICs as a linux firewall... in that case, your best bet is probably to get started with a specialized linux firewall distro, such as IPCop...

Read up on DMZ's, named after the place in Korea. Basically you setup two firewalls, one between the internet/WAN and your public server and another between your public server and intranet/LAN.

You can also make a dedicated firewall appliance using SmoothWall Express, IPCop, m0n0wall, etc. These are custom distros designed specifically for this purpose. All you need is a "boat anchor", or perhaps "doorstop", class old machine.

I am running SmoothWall Express on 166 MHz, 96 MiB RAM, 4GB drive. It provides DNS, DHCP, web caching (Squid), as well as intrusion detection, the normal port blocking firewall services, & the DMZ that you probably need.

You can try to buy one of those:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5094510735.html

Never tried, but it looks good and simple!

[]'s, FMC!