[KLUG Members] Re: Nautilus in RH 7.3 and Samba shares...revisited... -- dedicated firewalls are best

[Bryan J. Smith]

Quoting Tahnesha Pinckney <tep@hanify.com>:
> >>Yeah, I'm surprised too..but until I get this Samba thing down-pact,
> I guess this sort of access will have to do.

It's just one of those "I don't like my users accessing things freely."  It's an
UNIX mentality that isn't shared by Novell nor Microsoft.

> >>Now that's one mistake I haven't committed.  I just wanted to setup
> the samba share first since there were some files I needed to access
> on my windows machines.  Although, from what I hear, I probably should
> have started out creating NFS shares first since it's a bit easier than
> Samba.  But, as usual, I always do things the hard way.

Well, if you have both Windows and UNIX clients, they you'll need to learn both.

That's because your life is most simple if you use the service the _client_
expects.  I.e. SMB for Windows, NFS for UNIX.

> >>I plan on doing that sometime soon, but since there is no active
> internet connection except for my trusty 56K modem on my W2K box, a
> firewall is not the top of my priority list.

Oh, so you're not sharing the Internet connection on your network.  Good.

> However, since you brought it up, would you happen to know of any
> good ones out there,

The best firewalls are the ones that don't do anything else.  I.e., don't use
software firewalls unless they are on a dedicated PC doing nothing else).

> easy enough to configure,

Most hardware firewalls (or software on a dedicated PC doing nothing else) are
configured via web browser.

> but strong enough to block almost everything?

See, that's the delima.  A "strong firewall" will prevent 90% of horrendous,
Internet-enabled Windows applications from working.  Most Windows application
developers don't know what they are doing, including Microsoft's own application
division, so they design these piss-poor protocols that hate firewalls.

The result is that they either don't work with firewalls, or firewalls must have
more "lienient" rules.

> I'm very interested in BlackICE defender, but I'm not sure of it's
> comptability issues with Linux systems.

It's a Windows software firewall.  It's not nearly as good as dedicated hardware.

If you have an old 486 or Pentium with at least 8MB of RAM, check out IPCop:
   http://www.ipcop.org

The Linux kernel has a built-in firewall, at the network-level.  Nothing
available for Windows compares.  IPCop is based on Linux.  100% Web configured.
 Just grab the .iso CD image file, burn it with whatever burner software you
use, and boot it on the box.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. (BSECE)       Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
[ http://thebs.org/files/resume/BryanJonSmith_certifications.pdf ]
------------------------------------------------------------------
  The more government chooses for you, the less freedom you have.