lemmyreader, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Firewall for incoming traffic :

• 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.