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Paranoid Penguin - Building a Transparent Firewall with Linux, Part I

Issue 196

From Issue #196
August 2010

Oct 01, 2010  By Mick Bauer
 in
Yes, you still need a firewall. How about a transparent one?
Conclusion

But, that will have to wait until next time. Hopefully, you now understand the difference between a standard, routing firewall and a transparent, bridging firewall. In my next column, I'll sketch out an example usage scenario (conceptually very similar to the network in Figure 3), describe a couple different approaches to selecting Linux firewall hardware and begin showing how to configure a transparent firewall, starting with bridge/switch setup. Until then, be safe!

Resources

“Linux Firewalls for Everyone” by Mick Bauer, LJ, April 2007: www.linuxjournal.com/article/9569

Internet News' report on Dejan Levaja's latter-day LAND attack against Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2: www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3488171

“Ethernet Bridge” (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_bridge

Mick Bauer (darth.elmo@wiremonkeys.org) is Network Security Architect for one of the US's largest banks. He is the author of the O'Reilly book Linux Server Security, 2nd edition (formerly called Building Secure Servers With Linux), an occasional presenter at information security conferences and composer of the “Network Engineering Polka”.

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