freebsd ipfw on windows August 31, 2008
One week ago I moved to Luleå, Sweden from Estonia for studies. I had 3-tier firewall in my home network for testing, playing with diffirent configuration and just for securing my computers. Now I took only two laptops with me without any routers, my soekris-based firewall or home server with firewall, proxy and IDS. There is a lan cable with 20+ mbit internet and a public IP mapped to your computer in each dormitory room.
Today I have found an old good service in my bookmarks to scan your pc for open ports: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 and after scanning found out I had 3 open ports. Two were used by my httpd server and one I guess by skype. I didn’t like it very much when these things are open to public, so I tried to close these ports for public in my firewall configuration. And the funniest thing that I couldn’t. I had windows “online armor” firewall that was one of the best free firewalls on Windows according to the PCMag or CNET. If you block a port, the you can’t access it locally or globally, if you block a program from accessing the network then you also cannot use for ex. the webserver. So I uninstalled it and put Comodo firewall (I guess it’s the right name). It had the same functionality – just beautiful windows gui with no possibility to tune the params. At home I used OpenBSD’s PF to firewall my network but I failed to find the port for windows. Though I have found the ipfw windows project on the SF: http://wipfw.sourceforge.net
It has the same syntax, runs as a service and easy to configure! The bad thing is that it is no more mantained :(