I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter

Although I’ve got some familiarity with Netfilter/IPTables, I rarely bother with complicated rules on my desktops (although I’d probable be more paranoid if I was connecting my machine to someone else’s network).

I’ve played with some of the firewall GUIs that ship with Fedora (mainly the firewall questions in the installer, and occasionally gnome-lokkit), but I didn’t really get into them that much.

Yesterday I came across Firestarter which is a really nice tool for configuring and monitoring your firewall, so now my home machines are more secure.

As a downside to this, I discovered the NFS really doesn’t play nicely with firewalls. This became particularly apparent on my first reboot after enabling Firestarter. Ubuntu mounts remote drives before starting the firewall, so the initial NFS mount worked fine but the firewal then broke the connection. Not realising this, I tried to log into GNOME with then hung because of the blocked NFS mountpoint. Took me ages to figure out exactly what was occuring, during which time I did more damage trying to fix it!

Because all my music is hosted on another box, I was using NFS to access it but now that’s gone out of the window in favour of a more elegant solution – SlimServer and Softsqueeze. Except now of course I’ve added a Squeezebox2 to my (ever growing) hardware wish list…

Whilst I was setting up Slimserver, I also configured mt-daapd for the same music repository, so any machines that are running iTunes (my work laptop) or can speak DAAP ( i.e. XboxMediaCenter) can use the media with little/no effort.

On a final note, apart from my Bluetooth headset/VoIP softphone solution I’ve now migrated to Linux full time for everything else. For the time being I using a wired headset with the softphone, but I’m looking into hardware units instead. You can tell you’ve turned the corner when it’s quicker/easier to do things in Linux than Microsft Windows!

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