Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

While skimming through my list of RSS feeds (god, how I love RSS aggregators) I stumbled upon something that peaked my interest. In the latest update to Ubuntu (8.04, Hard Heron) they added a new feature called ufw which stands for ‘Uncomplicated Firewall’. If anyone has worked with a firewall before, especially via the command line, they know what kind of hair pulling experience it can be. Even setting up something fairly simple would take a lot of poking, prodding, and most importantly forethought and planning in to how you were going to set it up. ipfw, or ipchains certainly aren’t known for their usability. I’ve applauded both Microsoft’s and Apple’s forays in to making firewalling an easier experience even if both of them fall short in several areas. At least they’ve given it more effort than the entire linux community. However Ubuntu seems interested in creating a firewall that can be setup quickly and with a few simple commands have it up and running. In fact it took me under 60 seconds to enable it, allow access to a couple of ports that I wanted to use, and deny access to anything else. Because it uses the /etc/services file instead of trying to remember the port number for a specific service you can simply use the services name. Adding a new rule is as simple as “sudo ufw allow ssh”. As one might guess that command tells the firewall to add a rule that will allow ssh. You can, as with any other firewall, limit access further by only allowing a narrow band of IP addresses to access the machine. You can deny individual IP’s or entire blocks of them as well.

For a good primer on using ‘ufw’ check out this website.

I had forgotten how much working with Linux can make my brain hurt.  I wanted to get my old desktop box up and running again and I decided to go with Kubuntu.  I actually have a VMWare container of it on my mac laptop which I play with from time to time, so I’m fairly familiar with it.  The only real issue I’ve run in to - and because of it haven’t had the chance to have any other issues - is wireless network connection.  This is actually a major downfall of many linux boxes due to the fact most of the wireless drivers are closed standards.  There’s ways around it, but it complicates things, and certainly makes linux an unattractive option to your average home user.  The essence of my issue has been in order to do what I need to in order to have an internet connection I first have to have an internet connection.  Crazy indeed.  Right now I seem to have found a temporary work around that should allow me to get everything working when I piss around with it again tomorrow.  Fortunately I didn’t need to plug it directly in to the router with a wired connection.  I was able to gank a neighbors wireless signal with a USB wireless device, and the install CD seems to be recognizing that connection (it wouldn’t connect with my wireless router while it had WPA enabled, and since I wasn’t keen on disabling it I was lucky to find an unsecured connection).  With luck after the install I’ll be able to download the packages I need to follow these instructions that I found for getting it to work with the wireless PCI card.

For now it is time to go to sleep.  Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get the basics setup on the box so I can start mucking around with the more serious things that I want to get up and running.

Yeah, there are some days that I do miss being a geek for hire.