Re: Security on a newly-installed debian system
Deryk Barker said:
> Having switched at home last year (from Mandrake to Debian) I am about to
> remove SuSe (can you spell 'anal'?) from my office machine and
> install deb too.
>
> However, I have a slight concern: my home machine is behind a hardware
> router/firewall, but my office machine isn't.
>
> So, a question: exactly when will the newly-installed machine become
> vulnerable to attacks from the 'net? I recall there is a firewalling
> package with deb (although I don't need it at home). Will this be part of
> the dselect process and be configured to be secure on installation or do I
> need to set it up manually, if so when is the appropriate
> time?
you can install firewall packages, there may even be one that automatically
configures a default firewall, I prefer to configure the firewall by hand
personally. The newly installed machine can become vulnerable the moment
software starts listening on ports. Depending on what kind of network
your hooked up to will depend how soon you start getting automatically
scanned, could be minutes, hours or days. It really depends on what you
install though. be sure to install the security updates as soon as possible
and you will probably be ok. I do highly reccomend configuring a firewall
on the machine, I find it suprising that a company runs systems that
are not behind some sort of firewall and/or NAT, for the reason of IP
addressing alone, it can be hard to get IPs these days..
nate
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