Thursday, March 11, 2010

Firestarter - another great GUI front-end to iptables

We can use apt-get install firestarter to get firestarter running. After startup wizard, our rules will be imported to the iptables. Even if firestarter's gui isn't running, firewall is actually working so we don't have to worry about it.
We can check firewall status by running:
sudo /etc/init.d/firestarter status
By default, GUI won't be started after computer reboot.
To override this, we should make a simple configuration changes to some files.
First of all, we need to add Firestarter to System - Preferences - Startup Applications. The add an entry stating:  
sudo firestarter --start-hidden
However, the password have to be specified to run this command, because it runs with root privileges. Moreover, we can't specify the password since this is logging script, so it just won't work at all. To get it working, we should edit /etc/sudoers file with any text editor or via sudo visudo command which is preferable.Then add the following line to the end of the file or it won't work:
[username] ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/firestarter

That's it! Now are done and can start using firewall!

P.S. It's not recommended to start GUI automatically on system startup since it's a security breach.
P.P.S. Uninstalled it  after 1 day of using. Allows only 2 network interfaces to be configured as local or outside, making other interfaces to work improperly. For example, pings won't be allowed from those unconfigured interfaces at all. Maybe more inconveniences are present, but I haven't tested it any further. Moreover, after removing the Firestarter, ufw stopped working and I had to install Firestarter back and then remove it completely with apt-get remove purge command. It didn't heal ufw, so I had to completely remove it too and then install it back. Sounds ugly, isn't it?

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