Book Image

Configuring IPCop Firewalls: Closing Borders with Open Source

Book Image

Configuring IPCop Firewalls: Closing Borders with Open Source

Overview of this book

IPCop is a powerful, open source, Linux based firewall distribution for primarily Small Office Or Home (SOHO) networks, although it can be used in larger networks. It provides most of the features that you would expect a modern firewall to have, and what is most important is that it sets this all up for you in a highly automated and simplified way. This book is an easy introduction to this popular application. After introducing and explaining the foundations of firewalling and networking and why they're important, the book moves on to cover using IPCop, from installing it, through configuring it, to more advanced features, such as configuring IPCop to work as an IDS, VPN and using it for bandwidth management. While providing necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting sample configurations for home users, small businesses, and large businesses. The book contains plenty of illustrative examples.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Configuring IPCop Firewalls
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
7
Virtual Private Networks
11
IPCop Support

Green Interface Configuration


As we discussed in previous chapters, IPCop has a color scheme for referencing the NICs installed in the system. This is the first point in the installation process where we encounter these.

The Green interface corresponds to our local network and we can select this interface now. The simplest method is to allow IPCop to Probe for the network card, which it completes very reliably. If, however, we know exactly which make and model of card we want to use, we can choose to Select it manually which will then provide us with a list of known cards to choose from. This screen also makes reference to special module parameters, which are options we could pass to the network drivers in the kernel if necessary. Once this stage is configured, we can complete the rest of the installation remotely and we are asked to configure other cards later.

A slight complication at this stage is that the first card IPCop discovers will be used as the Green network interface if we...