Review: Firestarter Linux Firewall

Firestarter is a GNOME app that leads you through setting up the netfilter/iptables firewall setup with a wizard. Here, I have an old 400MHz AMD K6-III machine with 128MB of RAM, a 6GB disk and two NICs (Network Interface Cards) all rescued from the scrap heap. I'll be deploying this at a friend's home as a firewall and Samba server — I added a new 200GB disk as well for sharing files to his Windows XP machine. After installing a fresh copy of Fedora Core 1 and applying all available security updates to the OS (don't skip this step, since an insecure OS means an insecure firewall) I installed the Firestarter package through yum. There are packages available for other RPM-based distros and, of course, apt-gettable packages for Debian. Once installed, Firestarter had my firewall configured and running properly in about 5 minutes.