# [solved] Replacement for KMyFirewall?

## Olis

Hi,

now that KMyFirewall is masked and will be removed soon: does somebody know of a good replacement?

OlisLast edited by Olis on Mon Dec 07, 2009 6:46 am; edited 1 time in total

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## d2_racing

You can run iptables and learn how to create your own rules.

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## Olis

 *d2_racing wrote:*   

> You can run iptables and learn how to create your own rules.

 I know iptables and have it installed. But I don't change my configuration every week so it's easier to have a GUI to maintain it once or twice a year.

Do you read the forum using lynx? w3m? I have them installed... Nevertheless I'm using Firefox most of the time.

Olis

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## Havin_it

Heh, I second that. Firewall config is one thing in Linux that could do with a bit of GUI love for the sake of usability (well,  there are others).

I gave up on kmyfirewall a while back, as it wouldn't play well with my kernel config and I didn't really need it at the time. An alternative that looks promising is fwbuilder - it's written in Qt, so you should have most of the dependencies already installed. I'm only just emerging it myself as I speak so I can't speak for its quality, but from the website it looks like it has a good stab at making things a bit more user-friendly. Might be worth a look...

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## luispa

fwbuilder, definitely, it's very good. I used it for years and recently moved to iptables, buit was because I wanted to learn it. 

Luis

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## d2_racing

fwbuilder seems to be pretty good, but like with other stuff, when you can do it the manual way, you learn a lot more.

Just compare the installation process of Gentoo vs Ubuntu for example  :Razz: 

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## Havin_it

I have had a bit of a look at fwbuilder now, and would say it's certainly a bit more intimidating than kmyfirewall, but there is a lot of on-screen documentation so you should get a fair idea of what you are doing with it.

@d2_racing, I agree that none of us would be using Gentoo if we didn't want to get a bit more "intimate" with the low-level stuff, but at the same time you have to pick your battles! A lot of my time as a user is spent wrestling with X/graphic-driver issues, and doing non-standard tweaky stuff with PHP. That means I've little time left to educate myself on the -- let's be honest, enormous -- subject of iptables, and would welcome a tool that makes it a no-brainer for me. Especially now with 3G-enabled netbooks becoming so popular, when it's becoming common once more to be directly connected to the Internet (as opposed to the relative safety of hiding behind a NAT router), your software firewall is something you want to have working quickly without having to read an encyclopaedia first.

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## d2_racing

You are so right about that  :Razz: 

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## Olis

 *Havin_it wrote:*   

> Heh, I second that. Firewall config is one thing in Linux that could do with a bit of GUI love for the sake of usability (well,  there are others).
> 
> I gave up on kmyfirewall a while back, as it wouldn't play well with my kernel config and I didn't really need it at the time. An alternative that looks promising is fwbuilder - it's written in Qt, so you should have most of the dependencies already installed. I'm only just emerging it myself as I speak so I can't speak for its quality, but from the website it looks like it has a good stab at making things a bit more user-friendly. Might be worth a look...

 

Thanks for all the replies. I saved my current configuration, switched from KMyFirewall to iptables for the moment and installed fwbuilder.

I will take a closer look at it when I have enough time to make myself familiar with it.

Olis

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## d2_racing

Me too actually, I will double check this GUI, maybe I will be able to find some rules that I didn't know that we can code actually  :Razz: 

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