This article continues the series of articles on Fireall Builder, a graphical firewall configuration and management tool that supports many Open Source firewall platforms as well as Cisco IOS access lists and Cisco ASA (PIX).

Firewall Builder (fwbuilder) is a graphical application that can help you to configure IP traffic filtering. It can compile the filtering policy you define into many specifications, including iptables and various languages used by Cisco and Linksys routers.

Have you ever wanted to configure a personal firewall for your GNU/Linux box, but were scared of the complexity of iptables? Well, I might not be able to make you a security expert, but I can show you a tool that will help you to configure your personal firewall the easy way. The secret? Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder for short).

Free firewalls have become very common and represent an excellent alternative to commercial firewall packages. Most of these firewalls run under some form of Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD. Many of these free firewalls are front-ends for lower-level firewall packages such as pf, iptables, and ipchains.

Firewall Builder 4.0 is a major upgrade, it adds many improvements across all components of the program.

Firewalls need to be simple and firewalls need to be complex….yes, this is a dilemma of huge consequence. However, Fedora has accomplished both in one firewall. This new option in System/Administration/Firewall provides two layers of set up for the firewall.

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.

Debian Administration has an article up about the usefulness of firewalls. Are they really necessary? If you consider a firewall as just a non-stateful, layer-3 packet filter, then I would agree they are not very useful. However, modern firewalls can do all sorts of useful filtering that can protect a public application from compromise

Both Linux and FreeBSD are built on strong networking stacks, and both make first-rate firewalls and routers. Many commercial products are based on these. Eric Geier rounds up four firewall/router projects for our perusal.