Placing a firewall on the route between your local network and the
Internet gives you tremendous power and flexibility to manage your network
traffic. You can react to every packet coming in or going out of your network
based on where it??™s from, where it??™s going, and what it is requesting to do.
Linux is often used as a firewall. In fact, several Linux distributions are configured
to act exclusively as a firewall (running on media as small as a floppy
disk). Because firewall tools can also be used to protect personal desktop systems,
several Linux distributions include graphical tools for managing firewalls
in an appropriate way for desktops. So, in effect, almost any Linux distribution
can be used as a dedicated firewall or can simply be configured to use
firewall features to protect itself from unwanted outside access.
In this chapter, you explore the features used in nearly every Linux system
today for creating firewalls (using iptables features) and discover how to
use graphical firewall tools in Fedora and Mandriva Linux. To comprehend
how a lot of firewall features can fit in a very small space, you look
at how to use the Coyote Linux Floppy Firewall distribution (which comes
with this book).
The CD that comes with this book contains what you need to
create a bootable floppy-disk firewall with Coyote Linux.
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