Jul

2

Using Firewall Object in Firewall Builder

July 2, 2009 | By: Vadim Kurland | Leave a Comment
Posted in How to...

                                                              

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Firewall Builder

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 was introduced on this site earlier with articles Getting Started With Firewall Builder and Using Built-in Policy Importer in Firewall Builder.

More information on Firewall Builder, pre-built binary packages and source code, documentation and Firewall Builder Cookbook can be found on the project web site at www.fwbuilder.org. Watch Project Blog for announcements and articles on all aspects of using Firewall Builder.

Firewall Builder supports variety of object types, both simple such as address, network, host, or IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP services, as well as more sophisticated such as Firewall, Host, Address table, DNS name, User service. Firewall object is central to the program and is in the focus of this article.

General Description

A firewall object is designed to represent a real firewall device in your network. This firewall object will have interface and IP address objects that mirror the real interfaces and IP addresses of the actual device. In addition, the firewall object is where you create the access policy rule sets, NAT rule sets, and routing rule sets that you assign to your firewall device.

By default, a firewall has one Policy rule set, one NAT rule set, and one routing rule set. However, you can create more than one rule set using branching rules (for firewalls that support them). On the other hand, you don’t have to populate all the rule sets. You can, for example, create a Policy ruleset and leave the NAT and Routing rule sets empty. We explains more about policies and rule sets below.

To speed up the creation of a firewall object, Firewall Builder has a wizard that walks you through creating the object. The wizard has three options for creating a firewall object:

  • From a template: Firewall Builder comes with several pre-defined templates. You can use these to create a firewall that is close to your configuration, the modify it to fit your needs. This method is demonstrated in the "Getting Started with Firewall Builder" here or here.
  • Manually: You can provide interface IP address, subnet mask, gateway, and other parameters manually. You can add this information when you create the firewall, or you can add it later.
  • Via SNMP: Firewall Builder uses SNMP queries to learn about the network.

Creating Firewall Object Manually

To start the firewall object creation wizard, right-click the Firewalls folder in the User tree and select New Firewall.

The first page of this wizard is displayed.

New Firewall Wizard Read more

 

Jul

2

Installing Epiphany Webkit with Flash Capability

July 2, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 1 Comment
Posted in How to..., Installation

I read an interesting post comparing the different browsers and how they compare (in terms of performance) with each other. The conclusion of the post Linux Browser Shootout with Peacekeeper, suggested that Epiphany-Webkit was the best. From their web site:

"...Epiphany-WebKit absolutely blitzes the Peacekeeper and annihilates all of its competition (even Safari 4 and Google Chrome on Windows), besting even Midori by over 200 points. Seriously, what an amazing achievement. I’ll definitely be paying close attention to this browser as it moves closer and closer to maturity..."

Conclusions

Needless to say, it peaked my curiosity, so I tried it out. The first run was not too great, that's when I realized I had the Gecko version in use and did not enable Flash.  A bit of Googling, playing with my system (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS - Hardy) and a couple of explicatives for good measure, here's how I got this working in Hardy: Read more

 

Jun

29

Installing Compass on Ubuntu

June 29, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | Leave a Comment
Posted in How to...

                                                              

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Building a Web Developer / Designer PC

One thing I particularly enjoy are tools that make my work simpler. I was reading a post on Smashing Magazine about "35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design" that mentioned Compass. It's a a real stylesheet framework. As such it's of great benefit to web developers and designers who have some coding skills.

What particularly attracted me to Compass were four issues:

  1. Simplifies maintainable, semantic CSS that I can import into any project.
  2. Compiles my CSS files as beautiful code!
  3. Community support.
  4. Excellent support from the developer, Chris Eppstein, who was VERY generous with his time, patience and assistance while trying to troubleshoot a few things in our multi email session over the greater part of a Sunday afternoon (I'm sure he had better things to do, but I really appreciated his help in getting me going - Thats a great example of outstanding developer and community support - WOW!.

If you've not heard about Compass yet, Read more

 

Jun

25

Using Built-In Revision Control in Firewall Builder

June 25, 2009 | By: Vadim Kurland | Leave a Comment
Posted in How to...

                                                              

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Firewall Builder

This article continues the series of articles on Firewall 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 was introduced earlier with the article Getting Started With Firewall Builder. The series continued with articles on built-in policy importer and other topics.

More information on Firewall Builder, pre-built binary packages and source code, documentation and Firewall Builder Cookbook can be found on the project web site at www.fwbuilder.org. Watch Project Blog for announcements and articles on all aspects of using Firewall Builder.

This article demonstrates one of the more advanced features of Firewall Builder - built-in Revision Control System (RCS).

Firewall Builder GUI has built-in revision control system that can be used to keep track of changes in the objects and policy rules. If data file has been added to the revision control system, every time it is saved, the system asks the user to enter a comment that describes changes done in the file in this session and stores it along with the data. The program also assigns new revision number to the data file using standard software versioning system with major and minor version numbers separated by a dot. When you open this data file next time, the program presents a list of revisions alongside with dates and comments, letting you choose which revision you want to use. You can open the latest revision and continue working with the file from the point where you left off last time, or open one of the older revisions to inspect how the configuration looked like in the past and possibly create a branch in the revision control system. Here we take a closer look at the built-in revision control system.

We start with a regular data file which we open in the Firewall Builder GUI as usual. Note that the name of the file appears in the titlebar of the main window, here it is [test2.fwb]:

Firewall Builder

You can always see additional information about the file using main menu File/Properties. There is not much the program can report about this file that we do not know already. It shows full path where it is located on the file system and Read more

 

Jun

20

20 Useful, Common Linux (Ubuntu) Commands for New Users

June 20, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 6 Comments
Posted in How to...

I recently was asked by a new Ubuntu user (also involved in web, graphic design, etc.), what some of the more common day to day commands I use are.

Many of these commands can increase productivity, etc. by making things (for me at least), easier to do. My system desktop has a transparent terminal integrated into it. This makes it easy for me to run commands as I never have to open a terminal - my desktop in effect, is the terminal.

These are useful commands! Ones that will actually help you do something! Other more common commands (chmod, chown, ls, cd, etc.) can be found elsewhere on the Internet. I tried to stay away from such basic commands, unless they were really useful (like rebooting).

Hopefully, the following will help out some of my readers. If you've some good commands, feel free to comment!

1) To find out the processes running that use the most memory. When things are running slower than I want, and am looking for which processes I can kill:

ps aux | sort -nrk 4 | head

2) To see the version of the installed package, when I'm considering an application upgrade:

apt-cache policy xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is the name of the package).

3) To mount an ISO image, so that I don't have to burn it if I don't want the ISO after review:

mount /xxx/image-file.iso /mnt/cdrom -o loop (where xxx is the path).

4) Find out where that newly installed package went. This happens to me a lot... I just installed it, where did it go?

whereis xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is the package name).

5) Ever reinstalled an app to find the old configuration still working? This will Read more

 

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