Comes with a Firewall Setup

There is a pretty handy walkthrough of gufw from Ubuntugeek :

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/gufw-simple-g … ewall.html

On the other hand I just "sudo ufw enable && sudo ufw default deny" after first boot of a fresh install.

Not sure how much or how little of a pain it would be for corenominal to have that configured out of the box, and what issues it may or may not raise for some users.

I just tried gufw and I found that it automatically detected my p2p applications. I just select the program, click Add, and gufw adds the correct port. How cool is that?

You can also use firestarter (in repository, just as a hint).

The problem is people won't build their own firewall.

Even experienced users can forget - I did.  A good firewall should deny everything and stay hidden away, so it's quite possible when you build a new system that you'll just assume everything is locked up.  I remember building a slackware or similar system sometime in the mid-late 90s, and forgot to setup the firewall.  It got a worm within about 10 minutes of being hooked up to the internet, or possibly something nasty was on the local network.

The gufw function of knowing which ports are required by apps (I guess they maintain a database) is extremely cool and user-friendly.  The distro should perhaps come with everything initially locked down, and generate a message that prompts the user to go and look at their firewall setup, the first time any transgressions are attempted - ie the first time you run a p2p app or whatever.  Maybe web-browsing should be pre-configured, as that's so essential.

thanks for the link.
have you had any issues with conky with ufw default deny settings?

ok fellow #!ers whom i love, im not trying to sound condecending here..really.
but honestly do we really need someone to preconfigure our firewall for us?
it sort of sounds like having someone come over to put the toilet paper on the roll.

im still learning...
i installed gufw last night, and its FAIRLY uncomplicated, not entirely up to its name, but i can learn. id like to know more about iptables..not sure why that seems so daunting...its pretty well documented isnt it?

I think gufw is only for configuring the firewall, which is esentially part of the kernel (iptrables).  As long as you have ticked "enable", the firewall settings that you have configured with gufw are automatically setup at bot time (by the "ufw" startup script int /etc/init.d).  The documentaion could be clearer on this point.
If you genuinely wanted the graphic configuration app to automatically start, I guess you'd add it to .config/openbox/autostart.sh

Last edited by jackbang (2009-06-22 10:16:11)

Well Linux has the iptables firewall. Firestarter, GuardDog, and Gufw are just front-ends to configure it.

I like gufw for reason I mentioned earlier.

Try adding

(sleep 1s && gufw) &

to the bottom of your autostart.sh

Preferences>Openbox Config>edit autostart.sh