Firestarter to me was like using a ZoneAlarm type of windows firewall program. 
It was very super easy to configure but not very flexible. I could not figure 
out how to specify UDP vs TCP on rules. This seemed like a great program for 
your average run of the mill home/desktop user.

For a GUI I settled on Kmyfirewall as it was extraordinarily easy to configure 
and use once I learned the basics of how iptables worked. I also wrote a perl 
script to automatically block IP addresses of hosts that do brute force SSH 
attempts. The IP addresses are automatically unblocked after 1 day. Every 
time a change is made it sends out an email. This has really helped to keep 
my log files cleaner instead of seeing 500 failed login attempts in a 3 hour 
span from one IP address, then multiply that by 1-5 IP addresses per day.

Note Kmyfirewall is very nice but is still considered beta and it shows but it 
is not broken in any way that I can tell, just the interface has a couple of 
small bugs AFAICT.

On Thursday 22 December 2005 05:17 am, Gavin Seddon wrote:
> It's alright for some.  I eat lunch with a couple of dogs (canine).
> Gavin
>
> On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 09:01 -0800, Steve Herber wrote:
> > I would recommend you use Shorewall for an easy way to configure and
> > manage you iptables based linux firewall.  The documentation is
> > excellent. Plus, I like to have lunch with the author.
> >
> >  	shorewall.net
> >
> > Steve Herber	herber@...		work: 206-221-7262
> > Security Engineer, UW Medicine, IT Services	home: 425-454-2399
> >
> > On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Gavin Seddon wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > I have merged iptables.  Will they start at boot and is there a link
> > > for configuring on Gentoo?
> > > Thanks.
> > > --
> > > Dr Gavin Seddon
> > > School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
> > > University of Manchester
> > > Oxford Road, Manchester
> > > M13 9PL, U.K.
> > >
> > > --
> > > gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list
>
> --
> Dr Gavin Seddon
> School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
> University of Manchester
> Oxford Road, Manchester
> M13 9PL, U.K.
-- 
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