Firestarter is a nice piece of software for simple needs, which makes it great as a small GNOME app. It doesn't offer a ton of "stuff," it just quickly and efficiently secures a machine and offers enough notification and information for users to decide how to react to apparent port scans or attacks. By providing a handy menu in the setup wizard, it's easy to open and close services selectively in no time. It's a great solution for someone looking to secure a LAN or single workstation without a lot of hassle, providing a little peace of mind for free. The script it generates, it should be noted, is annotated fairly clearly, too, which means someone looking to learn a little about what's going on underneath the GUI can.

Next, we looked at Storm Firewall, a commercial offering from Stormix Technologies, producers of the Storm Linux distribution, which is based on Debian GNU/Linux. Storm Firewall is quite a bit more elaborate than Firestarter.

Next: Getting Storm Firewall »