The next part of this chapter deals with firewalls. The principal firewall tool for Linux, as of the 2.4 kernel series, is iptables. It replaces ipchains from the 2.2 series and ipfwadm from the 2.0 series. You will need to install iptables if you intend on using any form of a firewall.
Download (HTTP): http://www.netfilter.org/projects/iptables/files/iptables-1.3.6.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.netfilter.org/pub/iptables/iptables-1.3.6.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: 077e886a9c90a11bb47f3d7a4fc4a689
Download size: 185 KB
Estimated disk space required: 5.5 MB
Estimated build time: 0.1 SBU
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/iptables
A firewall in Linux is accomplished through a portion of the kernel called netfilter. The interface to netfilter is iptables. To use it, the appropriate kernel configuration parameters are found in Networking ⇒ Networking Options ⇒ Network Packet Filtering ⇒ Core Netfilter Configuration (and) IP: Netfilter Configuration.
The installation below does not include building some specialized extension libraries which require the raw headers in the Linux source code. If you wish to build the additional extensions (if you aren't sure, then you probably don't), you can look at the INSTALL file to see an example of how to change the KERNEL_DIR= parameter to point at the Linux source code. Note that if you upgrade the kernel version, you may also need to recompile iptables and that the BLFS team has not tested using the raw kernel headers.
For some non-x86 architectures, the raw kernel headers may be required. In that case, modify the KERNEL_DIR= parameter to point at the Linux source code.
Install iptables by running the following commands:
make PREFIX=/usr LIBDIR=/lib BINDIR=/sbin KERNEL_DIR=/usr
This package does not come with a test suite.
Now, as the root user:
make PREFIX=/usr LIBDIR=/lib BINDIR=/sbin KERNEL_DIR=/usr install
PREFIX=/usr LIBDIR=/lib BINDIR=/sbin: Compiles and installs iptables libraries into /lib, binaries into /sbin and the remainder into the /usr hierarchy instead of /usr/local. Firewalls are generally activated during the boot process and /usr may not be mounted at that time.
KERNEL_DIR=/usr: This parameter is used to point at the sanitized kernel headers in /usr and not use the raw kernel headers in /usr/src/linux.
Introductory instructions for configuring your firewall are presented in the next section: Firewalling
To set up the iptables firewall at boot, install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/iptables init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-20060910 package.
make install-iptables
Last updated on 2007-02-14 17:40:25 -0600