[Mageia-sysadm] Installing firewall

Sat Nov 13 01:12:33 CET 2010

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Olivier Thauvin wrote:
+
+> * nicolas vigier (boklm at mars-attacks.org) wrote:
+> > Hello,
+> > 
+> > The Mageia packages repository will be stored on valstar. As the
+> > repository will be needed on build nodes, it will have to be either
+> > mirrored or mounted via nfs (readonly). If we use nfs, I think we should
+> > first setup a firewall before installing the nfs server. A firewall
+> > would also be useful to filter connections to the pgsql/mysql servers,
+> > to the build nodes, etc ...
+> > 
+> > I suggest using shorewall to manage the firewall configuration. Any
+> > comment about this ?
+> 
+> I saw you mostly wrote the shorewall, however, I don't like myself
+> shroewall. Shorewall is nothing more than a set of scripts over iptables
+> and I think it add a useless complexity over this last one.
+> 
+> I widelly prefer to use directly iptables. I believe we are experienced
+> enough to write iptables rules ourself.
+
+For me, using shorewall is much more simple than writting iptables
+rules directly. I always forget iptables parameters, while shorewall
+rules are very simple. I don't know if managing iptables rules in puppet
+for different hosts would be as simple.
+
+> 
+> > 
+> > I plan to write a shorewall module in puppet, test it on jonund first,
+> > without installing shorewall (only writting the config files), then
+> > install shorewall on jonund, and if we didn't lose access to jonund
+> > install it on other nodes.
+> 
+> Playing with firewall on computer we can access only by network, woot !
+> 
+> I think access control can be done w/o using iptables.
+
+Some programs provide access control, but not all, and it is often more
+limited than what you can do with a firewall. It can also be more
+vulnerable in case of security issue in one of the services. So I think
+using a firewall might be better. Especially for build nodes where we
+don't know exactly what services will be installed in the chroot and
+maybe running during the builds.
+
+