[CentOS] Firewall frustration

Tue Jan 1 17:11:18 UTC 2008
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

Firewall is up and running.

Used Shorewall with Webmin.

Les Bell wrote:
> Robert Spangler <mlists at zoominternet.net> wrote:
>
>   
> While IPTABLES might be CHEAP (price) it is a very good firewall.
> Learn to set it up from the command line, it isn't that hard.
> <<
>
> Amen. I've been using CentOS for firewalls here for a long time now, with
> hand-written rules. Besides, generic firewall configuration tools don't -
> can't - know about many of the more advanced modules and features of
> iptables.
I spent much of the past 24 hours trying to find out how to set up 
iptables for firewall routing WITHOUT NATing. Could not find anything.

So I decided to try out shorewall, which has a front end in Webmin. The 
'nice' thing about this was as I built a portion of Shorewall (say the 
zones), I could sue the Webmin edit the conf file directly to see the 
'raw' config file and looky there, a URL for a help page!

Taking it slow, I got Shorewall up in about 1 hour.

But I have questions for the Shorewall people. They talk about iptables, 
then netfilter. The site says that Shorewall is not a deamon. Well I see 
a Shorewall service running. Can't see that is using any cpu cycles or 
how much memory. The iptables have the same content they had when I used 
the upstream's tool at Centos install time to set up basic 'firewall' 
features. So what gives....