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

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.

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.

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more.

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.

With the prevalence of "black box" appliance firewalls available for $50 or less, one might wonder why you would look for a do-it-yourself solution. Linksys and D-Link, among other vendors, create simple and easy to configure firewall solutions for cheap.

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.

Linux doesn't have much in the way of advertising. Now, the Linux Foundation is trying to change that with it's "We're Linux" Video Contest. So, here are my seven favorite picks in the contest.

Why is it even necessary to convince anybody that they need a firewall enabled on their Internet-facing computer – desktop or server? You would think that the role of a firewall should be obvious to any computer user. However, some of the comments that I have come across on this subject tell me that is not necessarily true.