Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” Quick Review - Uncomplicated Firewall
The feature that I played with this afternoon is Ubuntu’s “Uncomplicated Firewall”. I have to say that when I first heard we were going to reinvent the wheel again (I mean, we have iptables, right?) I was a little discouraged. After playing with ufw I have to say I am pretty impressed.
ufw is simply a front-end to iptables. We’re still using the same iptables/netfilter underneath, just not requiring iptables syntax–trying to make things a little more “for human beings” I suppose you could say.
Now I may not be the “standard” Ubuntu user as seen by the rest of the Linux world. I know my way around Linux, spend the majority of my time on the command line and even teach Linux for a living. What I’m trying to say is I’m familiar enough with iptables, so I wondered how we could possibly make it easier. Well they did a good job. Here are a few examples: