[oclug]why firewall?

[Michael P. Soulier]

    Hey people. 

    Everyone seems to put a lot of faith in firewalls to protect them these
days. I have a question on this issue. 

    If the box providing my access is running no services that I need
internally but not externally, why firewall it at all? If, for example, I plan
to open port 22 and 80 for sshd and apache, respectively, and run no other
services, then this box doesn't need a firewall, does it? Traffic arriving on
other ports will be dropped, and traffic to 22 and 80 are let in the firewall
anyway. 

    Is that a fair assessment? 

    I'm asking because I keep hearing people insisting they need firewalls
when I'm not conviced it will protect them from anything. I only use one
because I _am_ running services on my firewall box that I don't want
accessible from the external network. 

    Cheers,
    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at storm.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort."  -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
HTML Email Considered Harmful: http://expita.com/nomime.html
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