On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 7:15 PM, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've never set up a firewall on Linux before and after reading around on
> the internet, I'm still lost. I'm trying to make it so that only certain
> hosts can access the system with some being able to access certain
> services and not others. It seems simple enough, so I tried using
> hosts.allow/hosts.deny, but I can still access the the FTP server even
> if I have a line such as vsftpd: <my IP address>. I don't really
> understand xinetd and iptables is way over my head and definitely
> overkill for what I want to do. This is a headless server (running
> Debian squeeze) that I do not have physical access to, so no GUIs and I
> need to be very careful not to lock myself out.
>

Try fwbuilder (http://www.fwbuilder.org/). This is very nice GUI tool
to build firewalls. When you done, it compiles the right iptables
rules to install on your machine. Very nice and intuitive to use for
even very complex setups. The designer runs even on windows, and then
you deploy wherever you want.

-- 
Svetoslav Milenov (Sunny)

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.