I some advice please, i would like install a firewall and virus checker on my red hat 9 system but not sure of what software to use (a free one would be good) any advice would be appreciated, and a sotware thats easy to install too please.
Also a peer to peer program like bittorrent, (virus free) if any one knows of one please.

Thanks inadvance

The king of Linux firewalls is Iptables. You probably already have it installed. The homepage is www.netfilter.org. The rules are hard to figure out for beginers, so I would reccomend reading one of the 'tutorials' on the netfilter page rather than the actual iptables docs. If you just want to block everything, or perhaps open just a few ports, grab a pre-done iptables script from the internet and customize it. Ask us if you need help, or clarification.

Why not install bittorrent?

Thanks bulliver appreciate your reply, any ideas on a virus application?
Also bittorent thought of that but can i use a version for mandrake as i can't find one for red hat 9? cheers again
ps. is Iptables a built in software with linux?

iptables is part of the kernel, and then there some tools that you can use to send your firewall rules to the kernel.

The rules you send will be lost after reboot, so you need to create a script to load the firewall rules each time you boot up.

For newbies that wont get their hands dirty configuring all this 'stuff' there is a nice software to do the job for you. It is called GuardDog. Aviable in your RedHat RPM's.

Virus checker..... hu...? virus in Linux ?? I am a newbie too... but... I thought that there was no virus to worry about in Linux

Btw, if it is made for Linux... is made for Linux... Distro flavors matter little... other than 'default' setups, and philosophies.

Never even thought of using one.
There is probably an RPM for mandrake somewhere. Try www.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/ . If not you can always build from source code.
Iptables is the combination of built in kernel code, either statically compiled or as a module, and a user-space program, which you use to interpret your firewall rules.

What I'm trying to say is Iptables software interprets your firewall rules, but the kernel actually filters the network packets, and deals with them accordingly.

thanks for that much appreciated

There are several virus guards for Linux - 2 which come to mind are ClamAV and F-Prot (F-Prot is a commercial app which is free for home use, it also has a gui frontend).

There are viruses for Linux, thankfully they are very few (I believe under a 100), but it is worth getting a virus guard if you are planning to pass files to non-Linux users - you may not be infected by a Windows virus, but they won't thank you for passing one on to them!

Firestarter and Guarddog are 2 very simple to install and use frontends to iptables - if you don't feel ready to hand code your iptables settings.

thanks XavierP very helpfull thanks, how come linux is so free from viruses then? any idea

There are many explanations.
If you go with the view of the OS community - it is too tricky. To install you need to have root access, you need to know the directory structure of the system you are compromising, Linux installs nothing on it's own - the user has to initiate it. Linux is too secure. On Windows things will autorun without you even knowing it. And similar.

If you believe the MS community - no one runs Linux so there is no point.

The choice is yours!

Thanks again i'm starting to become more interested in Linux than windows (i'll have more time to learn soon), but one more question for you if you will XavierP. I downloaded F-Prot, ye a lialogue box came up configuring system, then installing F_Prot when it installed it nothing more, tried running (Run Program) returns no file or directory, is it installed and running or do i need to go into ROOT? ideas would be good please.

> thanks XavierP very helpfull thanks, how come linux is so free from
> viruses then? any idea

To put it another way, how come Windows is so riddled with Viruses ? Linux (+UNIX in general) does not have the historical achilles heels that MS still has (registry, no root protected activities). That's not to say Linux isn't prone to threat, and I would like to install a virus checker on my linux box, for the purposes of sanity checking internet activity (downloads, emails). I am not using the linux box as a firewall, and am on a firewall-protected network. I'd like to know, how do you like F-Prot ? Is it pretty much like any of the standard MS utilities (Norton, McAfee) ?

Thanks,
Colm.

I always thought that there are so few linux viruses because nobody makes them. People don't make them, because as you may have noticed, nearly all windows viruses (and spyware ctc) rely on the user to make mistakes - click yes in dialogue boxes without thinking about what they might do, running various things pretending not to be executables without seeing the .exe extension, not updating their os regularly. few linux users would make these kind of mistakes, making them much better protected - as is so often said, a computer is only as smart as it's user.

As for BitTorrent, get Azureus - it's by far the best I've seen. It also gives easy instructions on how to install on the site. azureus.sf.net I think.