On Thursday, April 08, 2010  6:59 AM, Adam Morris wrote:
>
>Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:59:30 -0500
>From: Adam Morris
>To: TCLUG Mailing List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org>
>cc: 
>Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Trying to set up a simple firewall
>
>1) Usually, its wiser and more secure to silently drop packets to avoid
>opening yourself to certain reflective attacks.  However, it really
>depends on your case.  If you're on your own private network, and behind
>a router, its perfectly safe to REJECT packets and then use the router's
>firewall to DROP packets coming in on those ports from the world.
>

Hi Adam-

I been recently on the same boat and learning IPtables more seriously for the first time.

Coming from PF I always understood that when you drop packets silently with no feed back the sender will most likely resend the unacknowledged packets rather then drop the connection, until a timeout counter expires?

However if you return with status codes such as connection refused this a better option?

Thanks. 

>2) As long as you don't have software running on one of those ports that
>could be exploited.  I would recommend running a nmap scan on your
>localhost to see if there are any programs you may not realize using
>ports above 10000. nmap by default doesn't look at the full port range,
>so you'll need to specify "-p1-65535" as one of the arguments.
>
>3) That's a little difficult.  Do they have dynamic DNS set up for
>themselves?  That's the only way I can think you could set that up.
>
>On 4/8/2010 4:39 AM, Andrew Berg wrote:
>> On 4/7/2010 7:26 PM, Adam Morris wrote:
>>> I would recommend taking a look at Shorewall
>>> <http://www.shorewall.net/>.  I can't stand dealing with IPTables myself
>>> but Shorewall simplifies the process.  Its still not as easy as some of
>>> the GUI tools such as Firestarter, but once you read through the
>>> tutorials and the getting started guides then you should be able to
>>> perform most things pretty easily.
>> It took a while to figure out the roles that each config file
>> (rules/interfaces/policy/shorewall.conf) plays, but once I had that
>> down, it wasn't too difficult to set things up, so thanks!
>> Three questions:
>> Is there any reason not to use REJECT instead of DROP? Timing out could
>> be indicative of other problems, whereas if the client acts as though
>> the host is unreachable, I know I'm being locked out by the firewall.
>> Is it safe to have all ports above 10000 open to the public in order to
>> allow the server to act as a seedbox as long as transmission-daemon is
>> the only service listening on those ports?
>> How should I handle trusted users who have dynamic IPs without allowing
>> everyone who uses the same ISP as they do?
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>
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