Canada Computes: A Little Security in an Insecure World

“The program effectively stands guard over your system and logs
any attempted intrusions. This includes things like attempted
connections, portscans perpetrated by programs which are designed
to sniff around to see if you have any “open doors” on your
machine, and what that door is. Portsentry, in the event of finding
this activity, drops the connection so the system at the other end
can’t connect again. It’s a simple little program but it works
exceptionally well and every friend I’ve pointed to it has thanked
me.”

“I’ve had Port Sentry running for over a year now and even on a
dialup connection with a dynamically assigned IP address that
changes every time I log on, I’ve had quite a few unauthorized
connections to my machine. It’s very reassuring to read the
portsentry.history file and see all the hits it’s logged. The
machine at the other end had no avenue into my system, but it’s
still nice to know it’s there. If you have a permanent connection
like my friend has, you really need to look at your security. When
my friend “went live” for the first time with his dedicated
connection he had made sure he had software standing guard. Within
minutes it had lit up like a christmas tree.”

“While browsing the mighty Freshmeat I also came across a very
useful program which spurred me onto my security kick called
Firestarter. It’s a GNOME program for setting up a firewall on your
Linux system, but as always you don’t need to run GNOME to use it,
you just need the right files installed. It also requires IPCHAINS
to be installed on your system, but every system I’ve ever had has
had that installed by default. IPCHAINS is an administration tool
for a firewall.”

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