The Monthly GNU Column
BRAVE GNU WORLD
This column looks into projects and current affairs in the world of free software. This month we focus on better security with Firestarter, a tool that helps you set up a firewall. We also look at a distributed computing project for animation or visualization.
Firewalls are more important now than ever, so a free tool that helps users manage their firewalls is always welcome. Firewalls A firewall operates at the network connection level, analyzing, monitoring, and controlling the traffic that enters or leaves a computer. On Linux with kernel 2.4 or later, this is the domain of iptables. Network traffic is represented by IP data packets, and the kernel specifies what should happen to specific types of packets. Firewalls of this type are known as packet filters.