Firewall security: Problems with simple Samba file share 3588

Those will be taken care of by their distros standard updates page.

But anyway the f-w makes no difference because of the logic that a server is meant to serve - if they firewall it off, it can't do its intended job.

If there's something wrong with doing its intended job, i.e. serving, then newbies shouldn't generally be using it (there are good exceptions, but newbies won't be into those).

Yep, but there is nothing wrong with those people turning on as many services as they like - the default setup is safe, or the distro is not doing its job for them.

But a firewall is a solution to a windows problem - namely that you can't know what is going on in your own machine. There is no such problem on linux, where you can see precisely everything, and what runs is precisely what you want to run, and by default it will be configured to allow accesss only from localhost (or less). The linux solution to not knowing what goes on on your box is to look and see! And change it if you don't want it that way. And if you don't use a fireall, so what? Nothing on linux will be dangerous to you by default!

Peter