Original Message From: Dallam Wych Sent: 6/24/01 10:58 AM

First, should I use the firewall that came in the distro or is the firewall2 Alpha on Marcs page better?

Hmm, in my opinion you should use the package that comes with the distro and try to understand the rules, then. If you got it, you could switch to FW2 and start beginning to undesrstand those rules. (It's much more complicated, but has lots of fine new possibilities ;) I guess you will want to rewrite those rules you find there, you can make things lots easier because the FW-Packages are built to cover lots of possible configurations... )

Should I then use SuSE harden as well?

Well, everybody should do it, independently from setting up a firewall ;)

Finally, I would like to learn more about firewalls so that I don't have to ask questions like this one :o). So what would be some good books to read on the subject?

I only can tell you the stuff I read, of course, maybe you wish to take a look at http://www2.little-idiot.de/firewall/ for example, at http://www.linuxfirewalls.org and at the book "Building Internet Firewalls", and you should read the manpages of ipchains and iptables, of course. HTH, good luck ;) Bjoern