I have never fully understood firewalls, and I have more chance of grasping string theory than iptables, so I wanted to check if my thoughts on Shorewall are correct.

When I lived in windowsland, I always used Sygate or Zone Alarm, when I moved to Linux I mostly used Firestarter. All three have one thing in common, they include a system tray icon. I recently ditched Firestarter on Mandriva in favour of the default Shorewall, and have found it to be very good (for me anyway) since it requires little or no configuration to make it work, it works well (according to Shields Up ), it starts automatically and it protects several interfaces (eth0,wlan0, ppp0). But boy do I miss that tray icon. For one thing it at least tells you that the firewall is running. I know I can check if the service is running with 'ps aux' or by looking in MCC, but that is a bit of a pain. Supposing the service failed to start, would I get any warning if I don't look for myself?? Then there is the possibility that the service might stop whilst in use (this happened regularly with Firestarter, usually when I changed interfaces and forgot to restart it).

I know Shorewall is an iptables front end, and I assume/hope that I am correct in the assumption that once it has set the iptable rules on start up, then even if the service itself failed the iptable rules would still be in place and therefore the machine would still be firewalled - is this correct? Secondly is there an easier way to know that the service has started in the first place or perhaps more importantly if it hasn't started in the first place?

From shorewall.net

"Shorewall is not a daemon. Once Shorewall has configured Netfilter, it's job is complete and there is no Shorewall code left running in the system. The /sbin/shorewall program can be used at any time to monitor the Netfilter firewall."

Seems odd as I usually run:



which gives me



anyway, I've never had a problem with it... If I weren't seeding all the time (and a little braver) i'd try to kill it and run a port scan to see what happens.

Thanks sport, I actually found this out for myself a few days ago, I just run the command when I want to be sure. As you have said, up to date it has never stopped running unless I turn it off myself.