[Mageia-sysadm] Installing firewall

[nicolas vigier]

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.