An Instant Guide To Firewall Builder
Open Source For You|April 2019

Given the ever present threat of malware and intrusion attacks, the safety of systems depends on having reliable firewalls to protect them. This article offers an instant guide to Firewall Builder, which is regarded as a significant firewall configuration and management tool.

An Instant Guide To Firewall Builder

For network security, systems and network administrators have umpteen choices with regard to firewall and network intrusion detection systems – both open source and commercial options. They can make use of utilities like iptables/Netfilter on Linux; ipfilter/ opfw on OpenBSD and even Cisco PIX and other commercial options via Sophos. All these firewalls provide strong security solutions to filter all sorts of threats and exploits coming from the outside world. Managing security policies becomes quite challenging as configuration options are complex and have many sub-features, which puts a lot of stress on systems administrators.

With experience, network administrators become experts in what they’ve chosen, but to achieve 100 per cent security, they need to understand the internal path of a packet inside Linux and its interaction with different parts of packet filtering systems. Things become even more complicated and challenging when administrators switch the security systems from one software or hardware to another, and this could even lead to misconfiguration, errors or security mishaps. So, to overcome this problem, systems administrators require to build self-customised firewalls, easy enough to configure security options and flexible enough to change with the passage of time, depending on the security requirements.

An introduction to Firewall Builder

Firewall Builder, also known as fwbuilder, is a universal GUI based firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (Netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX and CISCO routers’ extended access lists, allowing network and sysadmins managing bigger networks or hobbyists managing home based networks to simplify management tasks. Firewall Builder runs on many popular operating systems including Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, FreeBSD, MacOS X and even Windows.

This story is from the April 2019 edition of Open Source For You.

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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Open Source For You.

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