Firewall Configuration

People are often confused into believing that a firewall is always something good. That is not always the case. Firewalls protect you from the Internet in much the same way that disconnecting you computer from the Internet would. The main difference between the two is that if you are disconnected you cannot use the Internet. If you have a firewall then the you can only use parts of the Internet. A misconfigured firewall is as bad as not being connected. A skillfully configured firewall can do great things. For the installation process it is better to select no firewall and then configure it later. You can configure firewalls in text mode with ipchains and iptables or you can use GUI programs to use these tools. Firewall GUIs include firewall-config and lokkit (which can also be run by typing setup).