I'm on cable modem and always connected. While I have iptables in place, I just want to be sure and have extra precautions in place. I, too, am an only user on my box, but I'm not behind any hardware router/firewall setup. So if someone is able to breach my firewall, it'll be a bit harder to do any damage.......... ;)

I also added the note so others, too, are a little more aware of security issues. :)

Ahhh.... That's good thinkin. I hadn't thought about it that way.

I also think you have a good point, security issues seem to go mostly unadressed on forums. Nobody ever thinks about that stuff because it's boring. Too bad it's so necessary nowdays. :(

Took the words right out of my mouth...LOL

It is a bit tedious, but absolutely necessary these days.......And I still have a huge learning curve ahead of me on Linux security, which means I might find a better way of trying to accomplish the same thing. So far, by using Linux-PAM to restrict the su priveleges and gShield to set my iptables configuration, I feel safer than on any Windows box so far, but that's not saying a whole heck of a lot.... ;)

I hadn't heard of gShield before, i read the page and it seems pretty interesting. I'll probably check it out later if insomnia strikes again tonight...otherwise it'll wait till tomorrow night. ;)

I too feel safer browsing the web and just in general using my linux machine over windows... Plus, it's nice not to have to worry about virii.

Well, this is definitely off-topic, but gShield is pretty easy to use for the newbie (like me). All I did is extract it to it's own directory in /usr/local and created a symlink called firewall in /etc (/etc/firewall -> /usr/local/gShield-2.8), since that is where it expects to be. Then added this line in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

/etc/firewall/gShield.rc

and restarted the rc.local startup script by running this command:

/etc/rc.d/rc.local restart


Enjoy :)