A firewall, in the most traditional sense of the word, is a partition made of fireproof material to prevent (or slow) the spread of fire to adjoining compartments. A computer-related firewall, whether its composition is hardware or software, has the same basic definition where the term fire refers to a security threat. Firewalls don’t prevent attacks, but mitigate them by only allowing specific ports to be opened to a limited number of hosts inside a network. Open ports are still vulnerable to attack, and exploitation if the applications listening on those ports are vulnerable.
Though many contemporary distributions have built-in firewall management tools that create rules for Netfilter and iptables, it’s unlikely that you’ll find any as user-friendly as Firestarter. To begin with, Firestarter is very easy to install via an RPM.
Users on Debian-based distribution can use apt-get to acquire and install Firestarter. Portage packages also exist for Gentoo users. Installing from source is only slightly more difficult due to dependencies required prerequisite to compiling Firestarter. Specifically, you’ll need Perl’s libwww-perl and XML-Parser libraries. You’ll find Firestarter here.
No Kindling Required
Once you install Firestarter, it is ready to setup and use. You’ll find the program icon, in KDE, under the System menu. On first launch, the Firestarter Wizard prompts you for information about your system and network.
Firestarter requires that you enter the root password before using it. This is an important feature for systems acting as network firewalls and routers.
Firestarter Wizard
Click…
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