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Firewalls: what SHOULD I block?
(lemmy.wtf)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I think you need a bit of Swiss cheese in your security philosophy. Relying only on your router's firewall is a single point of failure. If it fails you are screwed. Relying on multiple layers means if one layer fails, another one might save you.
Well, screwed I will be, then. I'm not going to waste my life babysitting a bespoke firewall on my Ubuntu Desktop.
And it seems like a bad idea to be telling beginners on Ubuntu or Mint whatever that their "security philosophy is flawed" and they must imperatively run these 10 lines of mysterious code or else bad things will happen.
This whole discussion looks like a misunderstanding. OP is not a sysadmin on public-facing server. They are a beginner on a laptop at home.
I mostly agree with you, but given it’s a laptop that may not always be at home. It is wise to consider enabling the firewall when connecting to other untrusted networks like Starbucks
Yes, fair point.
As I understand it, the main risk of an untrusted local network is with DNS. The best precaution being to set it manually (to 1.1.1.1 for example or ideally something less centralized). Actually I used to do that myself, running a stub DNS server on localhost. This kind of option really should be in every OS by default.
Would be interested to know the consensus on better locking down a roving laptop.
You don't understand networking. The local firewall will only stop traffic coming in locally and your average Linux desktop doesn't have services listening outside of localhost anyway