firewall vs. closing ports Post: 14971

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Special Forums Cybersecurity firewall vs. closing ports Post 14971 by Neo on Friday 8th of February 2002 11:08:18 AM

02-08-2002

Administrator

If you have one box (a webserver) behind a firewall and you are already managing the webserver well, then a firewall is still necessary to block individual IP addresses that may be attacking open ports.

However, if you can add filtering rules on the webserver using firewall-like filtering software AND you have plenty of CPU and memory to handle the processing load, then a firewall is not necessary.

Having an extra and unnecessary firewall in place that is not well configured or managed is more dangerous than having no firewall when the firewall is just protecting one server.

I tend to disagree with LivinFree and think that firewalls are good, but not necessary 'the best' solution. The best solution depends on your configuration, your time, how much time you want to spend managing servers, etc.

If you have 100 or 1000 servers to manage then a firewall is much more critical than if you have to manage a single web server. And, as stated, if the web server has plenty of horse power, has IP filtering software at the kernel level, and is well managed, a firewall is an extra expense that adds minimal value for a potential large management expense.

Don't be fooled by buzzwords and seduced by technology, good process and well thought out architectures bring more security than adding more gizmos.

Neo

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

mrtg-ping-probe

MRTG-PING-PROBE(1)					      General Commands Manual						MRTG-PING-PROBE(1)

NAME

       mrtg-ping-probe - ping probe module for Multi Router Traffic Grapher

DESCRIPTION

       mrtg-ping-probe is a ping probe module for MRTG 2.x.  It is used to monitor the round trip time and packet loss to networked devices.  MRTG
       uses the output of mrtg-ping-probe to generate graphs visualizing minimum and maximum round trip times or packet loss.

       mrtg-ping-probe is not run directly, but is called by MRTG as a helper when it needs to determine ping time to a host.

       Act responsibly: do not use mrtg-ping-probe to ping devices without the owner's permission.  Just imagine if 10,000 people decided to  ping
       your hosts!  mrtg-ping-probe is meant to be used within your network to get round trip time performance figures for your network.

OPTIONS

       To  use	mrtg-ping-probe you need to configure MRTG to call it from within the definition of a target host. This is done in the MRTG config
       file, which is usually /etc/mrtg.conf.

       Here's an example snippet: change the target name and IP address to suit your needs.

       Target[your.target.ping]: `/usr/bin/mrtg-ping-probe 123.456.789.123`
       SetEnv[your.target.ping]: MRTG_INT_IP="123.456.789.123" MRTG_INT_DESCR="ping"
       MaxBytes[your.target.ping]: 100
       AbsMax[your.target.ping]: 200
       Options[your.target.ping]: gauge, growright
       YLegend[your.target.ping]: ping time (ms)
       ShortLegend[your.target.ping]: ms
       Legend1[your.target.ping]: Maximum Round Trip Time in ms
       Legend2[your.target.ping]: Minimum Round Trip Time in ms
       Legend3[your.target.ping]: Maximal 5 Minute Maximum Round Trip Time in ms
       Legend4[your.target.ping]: Maximal 5 Minute Minimum Round Trip Time in ms
       LegendI[your.target.ping]: &nbsp;Max:
       LegendO[your.target.ping]: &nbsp;Min:

       Pay close attention to the backticks in the first line which tell MRTG to execute the nominated external program. Note also that  you  need
       to use the "gauge" option, since the results of subsequent ping probes are independant values and not an incrementing counter.

SEE ALSO

       mrtg(1).

       The latest release of mrtg-ping-probe can be found on the web at http://pwo.de/projects/mrtg/

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Jonathan Oxer <jon@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

								  April 14, 2003						MRTG-PING-PROBE(1)