On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Gordon Campbell <gordy2007@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

Hi all,

I am new to this list and fairly new to Arch Linux. My Question is do I need to install a firewall? if so which one?

Thanks in advance,

Gordy

For a home computer you don't need to have a firewall installed, since you're probably not running any services (e.g.: web, database or e-mail server) that would listen on certain ports. Your router most likely uses NAT [1] as well, and this means that incoming traffic won't reach any machines inside the local network, unless you've configured port forwarding [2]. ---- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_forwarding

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 09:49:17AM -0000, Gordon Campbell wrote:

Hi all,

I am new to this list and fairly new to Arch Linux. My Question is do I need to install a firewall? if so which one?

In Linux the actual firewall is part of the kernel, you just need to activate and configure it. Activting it requires the iptables package, and configuring it means writing 'rules'. If you run one of the fat desktops (KDE, Gnome) they will have a GUI tool to configure iptables. In the other case there are various tools available, see <http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firewalls>. Or you could learn the iptables rules syntax and do it manually - for the brave only but the most flexible. Ciao, -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte !

Am Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:49:17 -0000 schrieb "Gordon Campbell" <gordy2007@hotmail.co.uk>:

I am new to this list and fairly new to Arch Linux. My Question is do I need to install a firewall? if so which one?

Thanks in advance,

Here's a good iptables tutorial with some good example firewall scripts: http://www.frozentux.net/documents/iptables-tutorial/ Greetings, Heiko