Valtiel said: Does this make any sense or do I need a clarification as far as "allows all traffic by default" goes. If so, can you clarify this to me?
By default, Ubuntu allows all traffic, but since there isn't any service listening to ports by default, the ports are indeed closed. The traffic sent to your machine will pass through the firewall but won't go anywhere after that.
A port closed is different from a "stealth" port. Closed means that the connection attempt reached the machine, but wasn't able to enter the port. Is like someone knocking on your door in the front yard but there is nobody in the house to open the door. When you have a "stealth" port, then the machine trying to connect doesn't know if your machine actually exists. Is like someone looking for your house with your address, but he can't find the house because it's invisible.
When your firewall is active, the ports can be opened, but you can't reach them. Is like a house with open ports and some children playing in the doorstep, but there is a concrete wall surrounding the house, so you can't see what is happening inside or enter it, unless someone from inside invites you.
When you configure the firewall to drop packages, then the wall (and everything behind it) is also invisible. When you configure the firewall to reject packages, then is like when you have a sign in the wall entrance saying "Private property. No trespassing!"
You should only be concerned with firewall traffic if you open ports, like when you run a server or a p2p application. Nevertheless, I keep my firewall up and running all the time, even behind a router with closed ports. Former Windows user paranoia? Maybe :)
Additionally, I have also [[COLOR="Red"]moblock[/COLOR]]("http://moblock-deb.sourceforge.net/") running all the time. In my opinion, security is never too much.
Valtiel said: Now in the article it says that Firestarter is for GNOME & Guarddog is for KDE. In an earlier thread I made, I was told that while Firestarter is an outstanding firewall software, the project is no longer being supported. I would like to install a software that is still supported by its developers.
There are a lot of discussions here in the forum about if Firestarter is being developed or not. Some people say "its not" because it doesn't need further development, but the web site is updated. So, Is not like a children left alone in a basket on your doorstep. Is more like a grown up young adult which still have contact with it's parents, but has a well established personal life. Which doesn't mean he can't screw his life in the future and need support from his parents to get back on track. (I feel so educational today :) ).
Some people say there are issues when you run the Firestarter, because it runs as root and have a bug that could be exploited to gain root access to your machine. But as long as you use Firestarter to configure the iptables, then close the GUI you should be fine. The iptables will do it's job in the background and it's only the GUI which runs as root. So basically, Firestarter and ufw/gufw are just iptables managers, that translate human-readable configurations into iptables commands. Firestarter does create correct iptables rules, like ufw does, but it has some functionality that ufw hasn't. For instance, Firestarter allows you to control outbound traffic while ufw does not.
I tried ufw, but didn't like it. Firestarter is much more like the those firewalls I used on Windows (Comodo Firewall).
In my opinion, you could use Firestarter for now and try to learn iptables commands. Is not that hard. Then when you feel you are ready to switch, drop Firestarter and create your own iptables rules.
Valtiel said: In the HowTo iptables they mention Ubuntu 8.04 was this changed for Ubuntu 8.10?
Not that I'm aware of. I guess since this is security stuff, if something had changed, they would update the info or at least put a warning. So, don't worry.