Add Firewall rules

[Bluelake (Keith Chadwick)]

This may well sound like a very stupid question, so here goes…up to very recently I had two firewall in place. The first guarding the whole network / DMZ and acting as the gateway, which I regularly check, and the second being the Nethserver firewall between the DMZ and Lan. As I am in the process of renewing the first firewall I started to wonder about the Nethserver firewall.

So here is the question, do I actually need to do anything to the Nethserver firewall or does it act from default. Secondly can I actually get my hands dirty and block IP addresses from suspected hackers…do I need to add rules?

[davidep (Davide Principi)]

Hi @Bluelake,

@Bluelake

So here is the question, do I actually need to do anything to the Nethserver firewall or does it act from default.

In short, it works out-of-the-box. But some concepts are required to make it work correctly. The NethServer firewall behaviour is described here

http://docs.nethserver.org/en/latest/firewall.html

@Bluelake

Secondly can I actually get my hands dirty and block IP addresses from suspected hackers…do I need to add rules?

Of course you can create customized rules. I’m not sure doing it by hand is viable: attackers IPs change frequently!

For instance, packages.nethserver.org was scanned by 244 unique IPs in 6 hours yesterday, knocking 30 different TCP ports.

[Bluelake (Keith Chadwick)]

Yep, its getting pretty bad out their, I think I need to study firewall rules a bit. I am in the process of installing a perimeter firewall on a separate box, possible IP-fire or pfSense to protect my DMZ and LAN with Nethserver firewall protecting my inner circle computers…