The sys admin's daily grind: UFW
Lack of Defense
Things were better back then. No way! Charly takes a look back at the bad old firewall days and explains why things are better today – assuming you have the right tools.
Watch out, Granddaddy Charly is about to tell his old war stories again: We had nothing back then. If you were in firewall support, that meant working on the front, in your underwear, at temperatures of minus 20 degrees. And, we used to have to build firewall rulesets using BSD's built-in IPFW tool, which didn't even have stateful packet inspection at the time. People kept locking themselves out of the command center or shooting themselves in the foot.
IPWF led to ipchains, which was a blessing; it was followed in kernel 2.4 by iptables, on which most of today's Linux firewalls are based – although the designated successor, nftables, went missing in action some time ago.
However, you can't teach the troops iptables in five minutes – not even the basic routines, such as allow all outgoing, block all incoming, except for connections on ports 22, 80, and 443. Uncomplicated Firewall [1], UFW is actually a much better choice for building just-so firewalls.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Dash to Panel Maintainer Quits
Charles Gagnon has stepped away as maintainer of the popular Dash to Panel Gnome extension.
-
CIQ Releases Security-Hardened Version of Rocky Linux
If you're looking for an enterprise-grade Linux distribution that is hardened for business use, there's a new version of Rocky Linux that's sure to make you and your company happy.
-
Gnome’s Dash to Panel Extension Gets a Massive Update
If you're a fan of the Gnome Dash to Panel extension, you'll be thrilled to hear that a new version has been released with a dock mode.
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.