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This is a Mini-Course on the setup and use of the Fedora 11 firewall. This is a Free course that is available to anyone.
Lesson 1 / Lesson 2
Course Design
The Course is designed to take you step by step through the setup of a firewall that will meet your needs. Much of the Free content on the Internet is disjointed and hard to follow in a logical pattern so we have decided to start building Min-Courses that focus on logical development and design to help take a student from the beginning to the end.
Course Difficulty
The course level is Newbie-Desktop User so anyone using the graphical interface on the Desktop will find the information useful.
Course Support
The course author, among others, will be available for questions in the forum.
Quizzes
The quizzes are there to help you focus on the main features of the firewall. Caution: You will only be able to take a quiz one time and that score will be recorded. So before you take the quiz be sure you understand all of the features that you will be tested on. Click Here to take a Demo Test so that you can see how the questions will be formated.
Getting Started
Certainly the first question many people will ask is, "Why do I need a firewall?" There are several reasons a firewall is important to anyone on the Internet.
1. Connections- Any time you are connected to the Internet, you must recognize that others are connected to you and they may be attempting to access information or resources on your computer. It is an ugly fact, that the Internet presents many opportunities for people to attempt to access your machine. The actuality of that access is determined by the applications that you have running on your machine as well as any protection that you provide in the way of a firewall. Typically users have a router/modem device that connects their machine to the Internet and these devices have a firewall built in, usually. However, the typical user also does not modify nor do they understand how to modify the router/modem options that they have and are often left completely open. In addition, the use of wireless connections that have not been protected with a firewall provides access to your computer from anyone close enough to access your wireless network. You need to protect your machine even if you have a simple setup and you are behind a router/modem.
2. System Integrity - If you have been on the Internet you have seen the problems with viruses, bots, worms, etc. One of your goals should be to maintain the integrity of your system so that you do not need to waste your time fixing it. One way that you can do that is to have a firewall running. It does not need to be a complex time consuming process to get a basic firewall up and running to protect your system.
The new Fedora firewall is a powerful tool that has a lot of options that can be confusing for users but these options do make a very nice firewall that can be effective in maintaining the integrity of your system.
You can start the firewall from the command line with the command
system-config-firewall
or
You can go to the menu and click System/Administration/Firewall
When you try to start the firewall you will need to have administrative privileges so enter the root password to gain access.
This is the screen you will see when you start.
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