[PLUG] iptables On Default Installs?

[Anderson, Rob (Global Trade)]

> I was pondering "sasser" just now, briefly, as I emailed my old man,
> telling him 'Doze users running ZoneAlarm shouldn't be 
> affected; though
> I'm not absolutely certain that's true.
> 
> Anyway, assuming this sort of attack is blocked by a good 
> firewall (yes,
> and not running unneeded services, etcetera), I'm wondering if distros
> like Fedora and Mandrake are installing with a default iptables
> configuration of any kind.  (For, if I say Linux users are better off
> for security, it isn't because their ports are nicely sealed; to the
> contrary, it can be argued they are better off only because 
> they are not
> running the poopular OS.)  If I recommend the Linux on the desktop for
> this reason, people might expect it to solve the firewall problem, but
> does it?
> 
> It could be a simple matter of adding a startup script or something,
> which is still better than installing ZoneAlarm on Winders.  But with
> Gentoo I had to write my own iptables script, which is not an end user
> type thing.

There are various UIs and script for generating iptables scripts. Still not quite an end user type thing, but certainly a sysadmin type thing.

-Rob A