Securing a host using the Shoreline firewall / Shorewall
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009Since I’m currently setting up a new server for hosting purposes I want to share some of my favourite sysadmin tools and practices.
The first featured tool is the shoreline firewall or shorewall. You can find the project at: http://www.shorewall.net/
Shorewall basically is a set of nice configuration files for iptables. Another benefit of shorewall is that it has no runtime part. You just fire up the tool, it configures your iptables and quits. This reduces the load and increases security. Additionally to the technical features there is one thing that makes shorewall really stand out: It has extensive, well-written and understandable documentation. You rarely find a use-case which is not already described in the documentation.
Read on to find out how to set up shorewall in minutes.
