Firewall or not ...

[Marcin Jessa]

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 21:05:36 +0200
Kiffin Gish <kiffin at gish.demon.nl> wrote:

> I have installed FreeBSD 5.4 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 using WiFi to 
> access the Internet.
> 
> My question is what are the pros and cons of running a firewall on my 
> client, e.g. is it really necessary.
> 
> I mean it's not like I am running Windows and have to bloat it with all 
> McAfee, Zonealarm ad infinitum -- or do I?
> 
> Thanks alot in advance.

The thumb rule is to disallow everything else than the services you want to be able to access from the outside.
FreeBSD makes it easy with 3 firewalling systems avaliable and pretty decent scripts.
Read /etc/defaults/rc.conf to find out more about the options to put to your /etc/rc.conf to enable and quickly configure your firewall.

Cheers,
Marcin