Opinions about new firewall in Sabayon6

[chasha420]

Hey guys, I just realised that there was a thread posted in this section sometime ago: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=23860

Some people including me suggested that some sort of firewall be included with Sabayon and I'm really happy to see that it has been implemented in Sabayon6! Yay!

I personally have to install Sabayon on a lot of computers belonging to my friends and relatives...even if they are new to Linux I recommend them Sabayon over Ubuntu because of it's speed, stability and out of the box features...and let us not forget that Ubuntu is going down the drain with buggy, unstable releases...to find out go try the alpha version of the new Ubuntu

Anyway, sometimes I used to forget about installing a firewall after the default installation or they didn't have an immediate internet connection available...so now I don't have to worry about that anymore

I have been using UFW for sometime now, it seems to be simple yet flexible allowing you to define custom rules, and I like how it has been integrated with KDE System Settings.

Anyway I posted this to Thank you guys for listening to us!

[genfool]

Give you my opinion, is not needed. I did test ufw firewall while was in limbo, I found no ill effects.
I have to wonder why some think it is important though.

Without ufw installed, A friend on irc wanted to ssh into my box, I thought it would be fun, why not.
Turns out, after I provided him with my IP, created a user account for him on my end, he could still not get in.
The ports by default were closed. I now needed to open a port for him, Then my router blocked him.
We gave up and he never did get in. I am sure I could have made it possible for him to get in.
Just saying, for the average user, I do not see why a firewall is needed.

Sabayon now has one, if a advanced user had advanced requirements, they would simply install the firewall of there choice.
I simply see ufw as a security blanket. Reminds me of the snoopy character that holds a blanket and sucks his thumb.
Was his name Linus?
I am glad that sabayon has ufw,, was it really worth the effort to have it installed?
I dunno

[chasha420]

Yes may be you're right...behind a router it doesn't make much sense to have a firewall..

But I'm also behind a router, and I also have firewalls running...but how can you explain something like this:



(that's the screenshot I took after an intrusion)

The same thing happened to me more than 3-4 times when I was using Linux Mint/ Ubuntu around 6 months back and I can't explain that...first of all my computer IS behind a router...and it is locally connected to my ISP's internal network along with a firewall installed...so with that much of complication it should be pretty difficult for the attacker.

The way it happened was also quite interesting, I have a net status bar in my panel and I usually keep an eye out sometimes. I occassionally visit IRC channels, and It happened all of a sudden one day when I started to see huge amount of uploads from my computer. So I tried to investigate what was going on...first of all I didn't have any applications running...nor torrents or anything related to that.

So I used nmap and saw open ports like telnet, and some high value ports and when I checked firestarter it all made sense. At that time I had no idea how to close/deactivate a particular service so before the attacks probably some services that were installed by default on Linux Mint were running.

Every time such an incident occured I kept a screenshot, went to the distro's support channel on IRC...they couldn't help with it even after I provided them logs of everything (probably they weren't interested in helping out)...so after getting much frustrated with fresh installs...I switched to Sabayon and didn't have such issues ever again...or not that I know of.

So in my opinion what ever you call it..a blanket or some god damn coffin...I'm willing to do everything possible to make sure there's no compromise when it comes to things like security.