Firestarter
Firestarter is a firewall tool for Linux, and uses GNOME. You can use the wizard to create a basic firewall, then streamline it further using the dynamic rules. You can open and close ports with a few clicks, or stealth your services giving access only to a select few. It features a real-time hit monitor which you can watch as attackers probe your machine for open ports.
| Tags | Desktop Environment GNOME Networking |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
Recent releases
- 28 Jan 2005 14:05
Changes: This version includes some enhancements to the program and a number of bugfixes, including Samba specific fixes, decreased CPU resource usage, improvements when running a restrictive outbound policy, and other firewall policy changes to ensure trouble-free operation out of the box.
- 13 Dec 2004 12:17
Changes: This version fixes various problems with broadcast traffic control, Samba services on the firewall, CPU usage, and overall stability.
- 24 Nov 2004 07:39
Changes: This a major new version of Firestarter with many new features and security improvements, including a brand new interface, the ability to restrict outgoing traffic, visual tracking of established connections, and several usability improvements.
- 03 May 2004 14:06
Changes: New features in this release include a GConf configuration engine, user-defined scripts, and several firewall policy changes. Important bugfixes include the firewall spamming the console, NATed machines not reaching the LAN in some cases, and problems with remote administration over SSH.
- 12 Jun 2003 14:43
Changes: This versions fixes a crashing issue, updates the software with the latest list of non-routable networks, adds support for metalog and syslog-ng (Slackware & Gentoo), and includes some additonal minor bugfixes and translation updates.
- All comments
Recent commentsGreat Stuff
I am a checkpoint certified security admin and engineer. I have used Astaro (also great) for years. I also create IPTables based firewalls by hand regularly, and edit previously made IPTables every day as part of my job and also for fun. I downloaded Firestarter and set it up on my new Fedora Core 3 machine, and it worked. No problems. Great install, great initial configuration Wizard, and great editing capabilities. I especially like the floating app for monitoring and configuring on the fly. Very nice!!
A fine piece of software
I was having all sorts of problems with getting my IPtables firewall to work. After about a week of frustration, I gave up and since I desperately needed NAT running, turned to the closest GUI firewall config tool that I could find.
Fortunately, this was Firestarter - a firewall config tool that I heartily recomment. It is simple to use, works well, has a nice set of features and also looks good.
My only suggestions for improvement are:
** mention that if you are using IPtables it expects modules. Firestarter doesn't work if IPtables is integrated into your kernel.
** An easy means of viewing the firewall script that it generates. I want to be able to use Firestarter to easily get my firewall up and running, but once it is, I want to learn how the firewall works
** Possibly provide a way to see how the firewall is configured. At the moment, if I want to confirm that I have blocked the http port, I have to rerun the config wizard. (Maybe there is a way, but I haven't found it).
** Possibly also provide some sort of statistical analysis of the results. ie I would like to know that in the last 24 hours, [ip address] conducted the highest number of probes etc. Maybe even provide a daily report which can be emailed ...
However these are only minor improvements. Altogether, Firestarter is a fantastic tool.
One of my favourites
the only thing I would include would be a text
widget or a little editor in order to be able to edit
the script, as a feature for advanced users which
uses FS because of being able to set up a
reasonably complete firewall in a few minutes.
Next update?
Good job thus far. When do you expect to release the next version of FireStarter? Do you think you could enable right-clickable menus in the log window with options to ignore the IP addresses? Thanks.