Re: The state of firewall management...

[Marc Herbert <Marc Herbert gmail com>]

> Dan Williams wrote:
>> Firewall UI is a hard problem,

Firewall UI is a hard problem simply because firewalling is a hard
problem.  Firewalls are designed to protect entire networks. No
surprise using them for single hosts is overly complicated.

Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> Exactly. That's why SuSEfirewall2 allows packages to define what
> ports belong to a service so the user no longer needs to care about
> individual ports:
> http://en.opensuse.org/SuSEfirewall2/Service_Definitions_Added_via_Packages

Impressive. Fast-forwarding to the very last paragraph, one can see
the ideal user interface: a network service manager.
But instead of simply managing services directly, everything goes
through an indirect, complicated and useless "network ports" layer.
I can't wait for the support requests for little-known applications.
And for the "services/bittorrent" configuration file. And for the P2P
applications not invented yet. I can even see a potential for
consulting and money!

Yeah, yeah, I heard: the average desktop user absolutely needs to have
Samba, Apache and MySQL listening to "localhost" while on the move. So
finally shutting up now. Really. Sorry for all the spam.