Graphical tools for firewall configuration
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Setting up a comprehensive firewall with netfilter and iptables is complicated. Graphic user interfaces seek to take the worries out of this demanding task.
Firewalls under Linux are usually based on the kernel's netfilter system [1], which was introduced in 2001. Nftables [2] is about to replace this system, but until then, iptables [3] remains the configuration helper for the complicated netfilter system and is regarded as the default tool for Linux.
However, configuring iptables is not very intuitive. If you don't regularly use this process, you tend to forget quickly the necessary command-line parameters. Iptables does not make it easy for less experienced administrators to configure the firewall, so several distributions have their own tools. Because of this lack of intuitiveness, running the packet filter at the command line can quickly cause damage by user error.
For this reason, many firewalls now have graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which makes this somewhat cumbersome task easier. In this article, I review four such GUIs: firewalld [4], fwbuilder [5], Gufw [6], and Shorewall [7]. I also looked at the PeerGuardian [8] IP blocker, which is not a conventional firewall (see the "PeerGuardian" box). Not included in this review are configuration environments that are outdated (see the "Not in the Running" box).
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