I just had a disturbing thing happen. I was logged into one of the tech forums that i use in my work. Everyone there has his own Avatar, a small picture that you choose to represent yourself. Well, one of sight admins Avatar had a block of text that read "You are 67.136.151.171, you are running Linux, and using Firefox. If you had a firewall, you wouldn't be seeing this." I immediately clicked on KPPP Statistics, and sure enough, that was my Local Addr.!!! I was under the impression that Linux comes with a firewall.
I'm using Linux version 2.6.11-1.35_FC3, and SE Linux was activated during the install process. Anyone know what's up???

try running the following command in a terminal:

su
(password)
iptables -L


that should show you the current firewall rules.

mcd
iptables -L gives me "bash command not found"
rpm -q iptables gives me "iptables-1.2.11-3.1.FC3"
man iptables , shows me the man pages.
What's up? Are there letters in the command that are case sensitve?

You mean an avatar like this?
Having a firewall doesn't prevent other people from seeing your ip address.

What's happening is that the web server is sending data directly to your own machine. The only way to hide your IP would be to use a proxy server, but all data would have to pass through this machine though.

Also, web browsers send an identifying string which programmers may use to properly format their pages. If you want to see what your browser sends for every page you visit, run: Then open a browser window, and type: http://127.0.0.1:8000

So, that admin is wrong. If you want to see really scary stuff, see http://gemal.dk/browserspy/


Note that most Linux distributions don't activate a firewall by default. Run "iptables -L" as one user said too see if you're running one.

are you sure you ran iptables -L as root? if so, try which iptables, or locate iptables and try using the full pathname:

/usr/sbin/iptables -L

Your IP address is needed for th connection to work. You can hide it using NAT or proxy (like Tor). Your OS and browser come from HTTP headers. It's not true that with firewall the info will not be visible.

/sbin /usr/sbin are not defined in PATH for normal users in redhat-fedora distros. so it is better to become root with
$su -
command. so those directories will be in PATH envorment. (iptables binary is in /sbin dir)


#iptales -nvL
will give detailed info about rules.


good luck.