Security

[gold_finger]

If you'd like, you can enable the firewall without adding any special rules.  It's default settings will be to deny incoming connections and allow outgoing connections.  If an incoming request is simply a reply to one of your program's outgoing queries, it will be accepted  (eg.  Firefox requesting a page to view); but if it is just some random attempted connection it will be denied.

To enable UFW, enter the following in a terminal window:

Code:

sudo ufw enable

That will turn it on and enable it on each startup.

To check status:

Code:

sudo ufw status

Or, for more details:

Code:

sudo ufw status verbose

To turn it back off:

Code:

sudo ufw disable

More info on basic usage:

Code:

man ufw

Other info:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/firewall.html
http://pka.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~jmao/node/28