Firewall Tutorial

In our last meeting, some of us discussed doing something on iptables and firewalls.

GlenOgilvie has run a tutorial on iptables and associated tools on the 12th of April, 2010. It was a tutorial with some slides so people could get their hands dirty and learn better.

People brought their laptops and could access a virtual machine to play play with firewalls and to better understand firewalls.

Each virtual machine had iptables, shorewall, ulogd, telnet, tshark, nmap, ping, and a couple of text based editors like vi, vim, joe and pico. Laptops should have these tools installed too, as well as wireshark if possible.

We discovered that the topic is too big to cover in 2 hours, so we started at the beginning and covered basic networking, firewall rules and an introduction to shorewall, and some information on logging and packet inspection using wireshark.

A later tutorial may include nat, snat, dnat (for connection sharing), discussion around custom chains and various tasks to test firewall configurations, with some information on how to make your firewall do these things.

Prerequisites:

• some command line experience, including using ssh
• basic understanding of networks, ip addresses, and ports
• can use a text based editor
• a laptop, or pair up with someone who does.

The following people RSVPed and turned up.

• BrijeshPatel?
• NevynHira?
• ShaneGeddes?
• AnatolyKern
• Tobias Gerschner ( no show )
• BoydSal?
• PeterArn?
• AndrewHill?
• LekshmenKannan

If you attended this, please provide some feedback below:

Firewall Tutorial Feedback and Suggestions (April 12 2010)

"As the presenter, I thought that this tutorial went fairly well. I realized that there is a lot to cover in 2 hours, so we had to keep it fairly simple and did not cover more than single host based firewalls. We had a few issues with some people having problems connecting to their virtual machines, but it general the lab VM's worked. There is interest in a second tutorial covering the more advanced topics. " - GlenOgilvie

"I really enjoyed the tutorial. It was a good idea of starting with the basic and then move to advance stuff. I would like get my hands onto more advanced stuff and as glen mentioned it was not possible in two hours so looking forward for another tutorial. Finally it was good presentation." - BrijeshPatel?

The following people would be interested if we ran a second beginners tutorial.

• PaulSaunders? - (could not make it to the first one)
• Daniel Lewis - djlewis78 at gmail.com
• Seth Fischer