Quoting Paul Dean
I'm still learning about Linux and trying to make my home network reasonably secure.
I have a network with a Red Hat 8 server which I am trying to replace with SuSE 9.
On the Red Hat server I had iptables, portsentry, tripwire and TCP wrappers running.
Where can I find information on setting up tcp wrappers with SuSE ? I've set up my hosts.allow and hosts.deny. Is there anything else I need to do ?
Any views on Portsentry? It doesn't seem to be on the Psionic site. Is it still supported ?
What are you trying to use tcpwrappers for? SuSE 9 uses xinetd, which provides it's own security, negating the need for the external tcpwrappers. Regardless, these days iptables/SuSEfirewall should really be the central focus of your port security. There's no need for portsentry if you have the host-firewall cut off access to unneeded ports. This setup also drops any packets sent to closed ports, rather than returning a connection refused. This means the portscanners will sit there and wait until they timeout. The upshot is that it could take hours to portscan your machine, and they'd still only come up with the ports that you purposefully opened to the net.