In my last entry, I was complaining about how I wasn’t able to get my laptop to work either at home or at school.
My major problem was dealing with the issue of how to treat my wireless and wired ethernet cards (Wifi used at school and wired at home) differently for the purposes of Shorewall. It was not until reading more documentation on the Shorewall website was I able to figure out the hosts file and get my laptop to understand that the home zone was a subset of the net zone.
I decided to treat North Central as a hostile environment, though it would be less hostile than hanging this machine off a cable modem directly. Me, being the paranoid security nut that I am, chose the more secure environment. Nearly everything is closed off, particularly anything inbound not directly related to my browsing or other activities.
For home, I have opened up SSH and FTP (inbound and outbound), the two services I regularly use on my home network. If I need more, I can always add rules or take down the firewall temporarily. Of course, the same outbound connections are enabled so that I can connect to the internet using my desktop machine as a gateway.
Now that I have a better understanding of Shorewall and its internals, I have decided that it is very cool. It does a great job of blocking unusual traffic and common spoofed traffic while making it easy to configure what traffic should go through.
