guarddog - firewall configuration utility for KDE

Guarddog is a firewall configuration utility for KDE. It is aimed at two groups of users: novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP networking and security, and those users who don't want the hassle of dealing with cryptic shell scripts and ipchains/iptables parameters.

This is the first of two packages suggested by Martin S. where he says that guarddog...

...is an awesome tool for configuring a firewall without writing all the firewall manually. I would say that for the purpose of protecting a notebook or desktop machine that dials into the internet, guarddog is really fine. It might be that you can do a more fine grained firewall by hand, but actually in my oppinion guarddog is rather flexible.

It has an internet zone, which contains all IP addresses not being in an other zone, and it has a local zone, containing the machine guarddog runs on, and when you have a local network you can define an additional zone for it easily. You can even have a demilitarised zone if you like to (see screenshots).

Then you connect the zones and can specify which services in a certain zone should be available to which other zones. By default guarddog is configured in a way that nothing is allowed. That way to have to find out about the program before using it. The whole design of the software is in the way that for every service you want to use you have to poke to hole into the firewall. I like this security oriented design in a GUI configuration tool for firewalls. guarddog is generating iptables-Rules and works nicely with Kernel 2.6.

More information on this package can be found on the Debian web site.
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