Linux Firewalls

Even though Linux is an operating system that is by far more secure than Windows, security issues still arise from time to time. In order for you to be completely calm and safe, you have to protect your Linux box with a firewall. Although most corporations focus on the Windows platform and thus, firewalls are mostly targeted for the Windows operating system, don’t worry; there are many firewalls available for Linux and most of them appear to do a great job.

First of all, if you are running a 2.0 version of Linux, you can use Ipfwadm. This is an old firewall system that is still used only for Linux 2.0. If you are running version 2.2, Ipchains is around. Ipchains is a software-based firewall system for Linux 2.2 OS; after Ipchains, there is Iptables. Iptables is also a software firewall but it is aimed for version 2.4 of the OS. Moreover, other firewalls such as FireHOL are designed to cooperate with Iptables. An important advantage of FireHOL is that it’s very user friendly; most of the time, it will do an automatic configuration to achieve the expected behavior.

Additionally, software firewalls such as PicoFirewall provide many storage-related advantages. For the concrete example of PicoFirewall, this mini-Firewall will be installed very quickly and will produce log files that don’t occupy much size. Of course, this doesn’t imply that the important details will be missed or that the firewall is not effective.

Finally, there are many other firewalls such as IPCop and ShoreWall. Most of those firewalls achieve the same result: extended security levels for your Linux box; thus, the choice of which firewall to get mostly boils down to personal preferences. For most of the time, users will prefer the firewall that behaves exactly as they would expect it to.