Easiest firewall?

[WipeOut]

John Fleming wrote:

>Was the consensus Shorewall??  I tried the archives to no avail.  I want to
>open the standard stuff like www, ftp, ssh, named, pop and smtp, and some
>ports for Webmin and want to block the rest.  What's the easiest for a
>newbie to start with?  Thanks!  - John
>
>
>
>  
>
Shorewall in my opinion is excellent, really powerful features that i 
haven't even started to explore yet and no need to have X loaded on the 
firewall (Sounds silly but some people run everything on their firewall 
which is not very secure).. If you want a gui to manage it use Webmin 
which has a shorewall module..

Talking about Webmin, it has an IPTABLES module so if you like you can 
construct your own firewall from scratch..

Then there is SmoothWall or IPCop.. This is a firewall distro with a web 
configuration interface.. On tiny hardware I have found SmoothWall to 
run faster also SmoothWall is far more actively supported since it is 
related to the commercial SmoothWall security products.. IPCop is a fork 
of SmoothWall and from what I can see IPCop has stagnated in the last year..

Finally there are the gui frontends to secure a workstation.. These are 
fine for doing just that but I wouldn't use them to protect servers or a 
network..

Later..