Re: Dumb questions about firewalls and linux

In comp.os.linux.misc Steve <stevesusenet@xxxxxxxxx>:
Hi;

For the first time in my life, I have a high speed connection at home (
cable modem ), so I know next to nothing about what to do.

I got the connection running with ( old Knoppix......3.6, installed
onto my hard drive ).

I think someone may have hacked into my machine because when I went to
reboot it I was told that my sbin directory was gone. Luckily, my
data files were completely retrievable, no harm done.

Please tell us what really happened, it's highly doubtable, you'd
be able to reboot successfully with /sbin missing at all.

I'm downloading the latest knoppix now.

Good idea to build up the system from scratch if unsure.

Will the latest version of knoppix come with a firewall and if it does
do I need to do anything to set it up to protect myself? Why didn't I
need this protection with dialup?

If the new knoppix does not come with and set up a firewall on my hard
drive, can I safely run my knoppix from my cdrom without fear of being
hacked until I can get to the store and get a router with a built in
firewall?

Linux fire-walling, which is build into the kernel, comes with any
distro, 'iptables' is the user space (CLI) tool to configure it,
usually outperforms cheapo hardware router in terms of features in
orders of magnitudes.

Most distro offer additional config tools to ease up things for
you, like 'lokkit' used by RH/Fedora to name one. Dunno about
Knoppix, usually use it for rescue purposes and alike only, which
don't need a firewall.

Attacks can only be successful if you run something service (ssh
and alike) open to the outside. If not or and you configure them
probably, you don't really need a firewall. Though it's good
practice to have one, so a single configuration mistake doesn't
let you come clean. ;-)

Good luck

BTW
Please try below URL(s) before answering, most people aren't
using a browser here to read/write, this is usenet.

http://www.safalra.com/special/googlegroupsreply
http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google
--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@xxxxxxxxxx | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 452: Somebody ran the operating system through
a spelling checker.
.

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