Yet Another Firewall Thread. Some advice needed.

[Peter Foley]

Heya all,

I have decided that it is time for me to setup a proper firewall.  I have
been following the threads in here and doing some reading on the net.

Some things that I have found.  IPCop == Smoothwall (or at least a fork of
the project).  Another firewall option is a BSD Distro (for some reason I
cannot find the link), there are a couple of others that I could find but I
am not sure how good they are.

After going through a number of resources I have decided that I want to use
something that is using IPTables, unfortunatly that means that I will have
to roll my own install (You need a 2.4 based kernal for IPTables) and
smoothwall/IPCop us a 2.2 Kernal and IPChains.

Has anyone had any expereince with just installing the minimal options for
either Redhat or Debian (I want to use a distro that uses some sort of
package system)?  Would this just install the bare essentials to getting the
system up and running?  Then I could run something like the scripts on this
page http://www.bastille-linux.org/ to harden my install and then start
installing the required software that I need to get everything working.

Does this sound like a reasonable idea?  or is this just a complete waste of
time and I should just install smoothwall and then upgrade (re-install when
their next version with a 2.4 kernel comes out).  Also as an aside I read
that thread on slashdot about smoothwall and some ppl raised some
interesting points about various security issues that smoothwall has.

Anyway I am looking forward to hearing what you guys think!

Peter.



PS : Some web pages that I am still wading through that other ppl might like
to read (that is if you are like me and don't really have a clue, about a
lot of this stuff  =p)

Internet Firewalls FAQ :    http://www.interhack.net/pubs/fwfaq/
comp.os.linux.security FAQ :
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/docs/colsfaq.html
Linux Guru IPTables :    http://www.linuxguruz.org/iptables/
Bastille Linux (Hardens Redhat and Mandrake installs) :
http://www.bastille-linux.org/
iptables Tutorial 1.1.6 :
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/resource_files/firewalls/IPTables-Tutorial/ipta
bles-tutorial/iptables-tutorial.html
Linux Security :     http://www.linux-sec.net/