Linux Mint is my daily driver. I enjoy tinkering, but I also want a distro that doesn’t need it when I get home from work and just want a vodka tonic and some memes.
As i see it, the term “firewall” was originally the neat name for an overall security concept for your systems privacy/integrity/security. Thus physical security is (or can be) as well part of a firewall concept as maybe training of users. The keys of your server rooms door could be part of that concept too.
In general you only “need” to secure something that actually is there, you won’t build a safe into the wall and hide it with an old painting without something to put in it or - could be part of the concept - an alarmsensor that triggers when that old painting is moved, thus creating sort of a honeypot.
if and what types of security you want is up to you (so don’t blame others if you made bad decisions).
but as a general rule out of practice i would say it is wise to always have two layers of defence. and always try to prepare for one “error” at a time and try to solve it quickly then.
example: if you want an rsync server on an internet facing machine to only be accessible for some subnets, i would suggest you add iptables rules as tight as possible and also configure the service to reject access from all other than the wanted addresses. also consider monitoring both, maybe using two different approaches: monitor the config to be as defined as well as setup an access-check from one of the unwanted, excluded addresses that fires an alarm when access becomes possible.
this would not only prevent those unwanted access from happening but also prevent accidental opening or breaking of config from happen unnoticed.
here the same, if you want monitoring is also up to you and your concept of security, as is with redundancy.
In general i would suggest to setup an ip filtering “firewall” if you have ip forwarding activated for some reason. a rather tight filtering would maybe only allow what you really need, while DROPping all other requests, but sometimes icmp comes in handy, so maybe you want ping or MTU discovery to actually work. always depends on what you have and how strong you want to protect it from what with what effort. a generic ip filter to only allow outgoing connections on a single workstation may be a good idea as second layer of “defence” in case your router has hidden vendor backdoors that either the vendor sold or someone else simply discovered. Disallowing all that might-be-usable-for-some-users-default-on-protocols like avahi & co in some distros would probably help a bit then.
so there is no generic fault-proof rule of thumb…
to number 5.: what sort of “not trusting” the software? might, has or “will” have: a. security flaws in code b. insecurity by design c. backdoors by gov, vendor or distributor d. spy functionality e. annoying ads as soon as it has internet connection f. all of the above (now guess the likely vendors for this one)
for c d and e one might also want to filter some outgoing connection…
one could also use an ip filtering firewall to keep logs small by disallowing those who obviously have intentions you dislike (fail2ban i.e.)
so maybe create a concept first and ask how to achieve the desired precautions then. or just start with your idea of the firewall and dig into some of the appearing rabbit holes afterwards ;-)
I used to “virtual distro hop” because I tried a lot of distros in VMs before dualbooting. I installed Tumbleweed and haven’t changed ever since.
I don’t regret keeping my distro, I’ve been curious, of course, but I think i already have it all:
Stability
The newest updates
I know my system very well
By knowing my system, I can fix most problems and I know where to go if I can’t.
I sometimes try distros in VMs, but with that and Distrobox I think I already have everything I could need to learn and try them in case I need to work with them in the future :)
Arch Linux, rolling Linux distribution, would give you the newest stable software, with probably new application features, but you can use distrobox, podman-toolbox, VirtualBox, KVM (QEMU) or a live Linux cd image to play with Arch Linux every now and then, without having to install it :)
If you a home user with your computer or laptop inside a LAN you would not really need a firewall, unless you start to use applications which expose its ports to 0.0.0.0 rather than 127.0.0.1 (I believe Redis server software did this a few years ago) and do not trust other users or devices (smart home devices, phones, tablets, modems, switches and so on) inside your LAN.
If you are running a server with just a few services, for example ssh, smtp, https, some hosting company people I knew argue that no firewall is needed. I am not sure, my knowledge is lacking.
Application firewalls, watching also outgoing traffic :
If you compare Linux with some other Operating System you will see that on Linux for years an application firewall was non existing. But there is a choice now : opensnitch This can be useful if you run desktop applications that you do not fully trust, or want more control.
Sounds like distrobox/ toolbx would be the easiest here. There’s an ubuntu 18.04 image here github.com/toolbx-images/images it’s like a vm without all the overhead
Each container, by default, runs in a separate network namespace. You can use docker CLI to create specific networks that can be shared with other containers, or use docker-compose for it. Technically, for processes outside containers you can still use the same network of that container by running the inside the network namespace of the ‘VPN’ container (for example running them with unshare). However, I wouldn’t recommend this, as containers are supposed to run mostly isolated workload and not for this kind of use-case. But yeah, technically it’s feasible.
This suggests that if you can build the ROS 1 from source, you have Flatpak and Snap as option, and maybe also AppImage.
Besides that there is also Linux KVM (QEMU) which may perform better than VirtualBox. Cannot find a good page for Ubuntu on it, but here’s the KVM entry of the excellent Arch Linux wiki wiki.archlinux.org/title/KVM
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