Networking :: Why not enable firewall by default?

It would be nice if DSL came with a personal firewall enabled (IPChains or whatever) so that we wouldn't have to worry about unsafe environments - especially in a CD-based distro where patching is not really an option.

Any chance of that happening in an upcoming release? You could always give the option to drop or pinhole the firewall if that is needed later.

Chip

Not unless someone can figure out how to install ipchains or iptables + a configuration tool and squeeze it into 0.2MB of disk space.

It is a minor miracle that they could even fit Firefox into the base cd.

A firewall extension on the other hand is quite doable.

There is an iptables.dsl and an rcfirewall.dsl in the repository.

No "GUI" , but very workable..

73
ke4nt

So, if one is running a live CD, and has no firewall,.... what is the worst thing an intruder can do ?

Take control of your computer somehow, get "root" priviledges and then issue a "dd" command that erases the entire contents of your hard drive even though you are not booting from it.

I'm sure that there are worse things that can happen, but that one is bad enough as it is.

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