Joss Winn wrote:
I am on 56k dial up so I really can't offer any more advice on your question than join the suse-security list or mail Marc himself. He is quick to respond as are the list members.
Will do!
My firewall fails on boot up because I am not connected to the net, but when I dial up, it fires up and all is dandy.
Ah, that's more like what I would have expected to happen in my case too, if I connect only later in the session.
- Any other reason I should upgrade to a later version? (The .rpm updates mentioned at http://www.suse.de/~marc/SuSE.html don't seem to exist on the ppc side.)
The firewall is not architecture specific, just kernel version specific. I just downloaded the appropriate tar.gz and ran the install script. It was just as easy to install as a RPM. I think people on the suse-security list trust Marc's latest firewalls. He is certainly very confident about them. Don't think you have to stick with RPMs. Remember that his latest versions are unofficial updates to the SuSE rpms, so I personally would trust them more.
good luck Joss
Thanks for the advice - I've downloaded SuSEfirewall 4.8 from Marc's page, and will probably end up installing it. It's just that I was a bit more confident in my own ability to *uninstall* an .rpm, in case anything goes wrong :-) (Also, I felt not quite ready to use a "beta" for my first firewall experience.) The 7.1 distribution has a SuSEfirewall.rpm, but it's not so easy to figure out what version/files it contains, which kernel it supports, and what the dependencies are. Is this info readily available anywhere on the web, à la rpmfind? At least not in these natural places, ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/7.1/full-names/ppc/ or http://suse.de/en/produkte/susesoft/ppc/Pakete/SuSEfirewall.html (I hope I don't come across as a whiner for deploring this. Of course, *now* that my Linux box is online, I can find out all this information by ftping an rpm query, but this kind of assumes that all problems have already been solved, right? Also it seems to assume that I dug the German database, http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/de/html/sm_masq2.html, to find out that the 7.0 "firewals.rpm" has become "SuSEfirewall.rpm" in 7.1.) Hmmm, as long as it's working, I better stop bitching :-) Thanks a lot for the response, hysterion