Do i need to install a firewall with ubuntu

There is a firewall built into the kernel called iptables. You do not need to do anything unless you start opening up ports. If you want to configure specific ports iptables is not so friendly but you can install firestarter which is a graphical front end. In short, a default install is quite secure.

Thanks for your question.

In general, linux systems are less vulnerable than Windows system, if only for the reason that there are fewer "target systems" and therefore it is less interesting for most to put in the work.

However, personally, I believe every system that is on the network should be hardened as good as possible and feasible. Therefore I run a firewall.

Linux has a build-in firewall in the kernel, called iptables. However, iptables are somewhat cumbersome to setup. Therefore there are also application that help with it. Very popular is Firestarter. Here is a small help page for using that: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Firestarter

More information about the iptables themselves, are here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo

I hope this helps.

Ralph i totally agree with you and i don't connect any pc to a public insecure network without a firewall on it.

I don't like gui interface to setup iptables firewall.

I have wrote a very simple (and portable) shell script iptables based firewall, that work good for me

It can be set on all my GNU Linux installed pc in about 20 seconds ;-)

Warrid do you want to try it as a starting point...?

elart.it

Thanks I would love to try this i am new so any help you can give is relly apreciated thanks to Ralph for the links and his time

Regards

Warrid

Please open a Terminal from the menu Applications->Accessories->Terminal and type:

sudo ifconfig -a

give your user password when requested, you don't see nothing when you type it, then press enter.

Copy and paste the result here

Thank you

Hi Marcobra,

I have the same questions as above. Have read through it and would love some help. I have done what you suggested in the above comment and got a reply quoting the following.

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:17:31:40:20:76
          inet addr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::217:31ff:fe40:2076/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:33839 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:28786 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:38489971 (36.7 MB) TX bytes:4423733 (4.2 MB)
          Base address:0xa000 Memory:d3000000-d3020000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

Thanks,

Matt