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> Hate to say it, but out of the box Windows has the most flexible firewall compared to OS X and Linux. 1) Why would you hate to say it? If a tool is good, it'
by simoncion 11y ago
> Hate to say it, but out of the box Windows has the most flexible firewall compared to OS X and Linux.
1) Why would you hate to say it? If a tool is good, it's good. :)
2) Maybe the Windows Firewall GUI only exposes a tiny sliver of the functionality, but it's reasonably possible [0] to make really complex iptables rules. :)
[0] "Reasonably possible" as in, iptables provides the tools required to manage a fair bit of complexity.
- simoncion 11y agoUgh. 16-hours later follow up comment (because I accidentally a couple of entire sentences): Maybe the WF GUI only exposes a tiny sliver of what you can do with WF, but WF seems really limited when compared to iptables. It seems that the only thing you can do in WF that you can't do in stock iptables is refuse to direct IP traffic to (or from) a given program on the system.
- mschuster91 11y agoActually my usecase is to deny all traffic except for special applications - I'm often on mobile/tethered connections so I only want my browser but not crap like automatic updates or other background tasks to eat up my bandwidth. Impossible on OS X and Linux without shelling out $$$.
- simoncion 11y ago> Impossible on OS X and Linux without shelling out $$$. I've never used it, so I can't endorse it, but this was among the first results in a google search for "linux per application firewall": http://douaneapp.com/ http://douaneapp.com/ I guess there has been progress in this space since you last looked. There is also SELinux controls that can be used... so -IIRC- you could create a per-app firewall with that. :) I would be slightly surprised if there weren't pretty reasonable GUIs for managing such SELinux rules.