It’s a shell script that you may want to take a look at: you will see that he rules you created graphically have been transformed into iptables commands. fw file in that directory (in my case: /home/bronto/ifts.fw). Just take a look (using Nautilus or using the command line) and you will find a. Since /home/bronto/ifts.fwb is my source file, then something “ifts”-related has been probably built in /home/bronto, my home directory. Just look at the first line, it says fwb_ipt -f /home/bronto/ifts.fwb -d /home/bronto ifts
Since it says “Policy compiled successfully” you may well expect to find something somewhere that will finally activate your brand new firewall, but where? Just press the gear button (Compile) in the button bar. The last rule (rule 2) will be the one that will be used if neither rule 1 nor rule 2 match: the connection is denied and the attempt is logged.Īssuming that you are satisfied with these rules so far, how do you actually use them? Figure 5: Compiling your firewall rules As you will easily realize, you can accept SSH connections, ping requests and other useful ICMP requests (rule 0) you will also be allowed to open connections to anywhere you like (rule 1). Figure 4: Your first firewall configuration is there, already!Īfter a few moments you are shown a graphical representation of the pre-set rules for this template. Please choose “host fw template 1” and go ahead. Figure 3: Starting with a wizardĪt this point you are presented a list of canned templates. To use the wizard, be sure to check the “Use preconfigured template firewall objects”. You are now asked for a name, a firewall application and an operating system: for the name, choose any one you like (“ifts” is the name I give to my firewall for historical reasons) for the other two, I am assuming you are using iptables on GNU/Linux. Figure 2: Selecting your firewall’s platform Right click on the folder and choose “New firewall” from the context menu. Look at the “Firewalls” folder at the top left: it’s empty and we are going to create a new one. Figure 1: Starting to create your personal firewall We are just playing around, so leave them unchecked and go ahead with “Finish”. You are then asked if you want to use a Revision Control System and if you want this project to be the default one. The program will come out with a welcome window that asks if you want to open an existing file or create a new project: choose to create a new one and give a filename, then click on “Next”. You can run Firewall Builder by finding it in a menu and clicking on its icon, by simply firing up a terminal window and typing fwbuilder. The latest release is the 2.1.10, which you can compile by yourself by downloading the source from SourceForge. I will assume that you already installed Firewall Builder on your system (using apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager, for example).įirewall Builder 2.0.9 is not the latest release available, but it’s the one that currently ships with distributions like Debian Testing and Ubuntu Edgy. I will create the basic configuration with a wizard and add some customisations afterwards.įirewall Builder is a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows you to configure a number of firewall engines in many different environments Therefore, I’ll focus on a specific case-configuring a "personal" firewall (that is, a firewall that protects just the one computer it is running on) on a DHCP-configured machine. Obviously, if I had to talk about internet security in general and about all possible uses of Firewall Builder on all the possible platforms, I’d be better off writing a book. As of version 2.0.9 it supports these firewall softwares: The secret? Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder for short).įirewall Builder is a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows you to configure a number of firewall engines in many different environments. Have you ever wanted to configure a personal firewall for your GNU/Linux box, but were scared of the complexity of iptables? Well, I might not be able to make you a security expert, but I can show you a tool that will help you to configure your personal firewall the easy way.