What GUI firewall manager should I use to replace Firestarter?

Question

Apparently Firestarter is no longer maintained, and it does not have any options in its interface for handling the connection to a VPN. Right now, my VPN does not work if my Firewall is activated.

I would like to find an alternative GUI firewall manager that will let me make configurations to accomodate my VPN service. Which should I use, and what considerations should I take into account when migrating from Firestarter?

I did a Google search, and tried to restrict results within the last year, but it seems people are still recommending Firestarter, despite it not being maintained.

With almost near certainty, someone will probably suggest that I just manage my "iptables" from the command line. Please understand that I am not interested in a command line interface for managing my firewall. Thanks.

Solution

First of all, the main reason behind Firestarter not being maintained any more is that Ubuntu comes in with the firewall called ufw by default. You can install a graphical interface to ufw by selecting it from the Ubuntu Software Center (package gufw) or by typing

sudo apt-get install gufw

Please note that any and every "firewall" in Ubuntu will be some kind of interface to the iptables. Some of these interfaces are graphical (like Firestarter), some not (like ufw), some are not graphical, but come with their own graphical interface. You will find more information on this page.

Also, please consider the following. Firewall can be of real use if you do understand iptables and the way TCP/IP works. If you do, then configuring the firewall using either naked iptables or some kind of text interface based on config files (like ufw) usually presents no problem.

Comments

[Admin]

I came across this thread because I'm looking for a simple gui firewall for my single-user system (so I'm trying out gufw - thanks belacqua). But in general, I'm with you Dave (sorry for the very delayed support): command line is not the way to go if you have anything complex to manage. A good gui catches most of the 'God, how could I have done that' mistakes that everyone makes. For such purposes, the fwbuilder tool is excellent (I use it to maintain two systems, one a reasonably large and complex web/svn server, the other a cluster controller with complex trust management requirements).