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From what I have been able to piece together, the firewall that comes with Ubuntu is iptables, which is very complicated, so an easier way to access the firewall is through UFW and GUFW. UFW is accessed through commands, and GUFW is a graphical interface that makes configuring the firewall easier than UFW. Is this accurate?

Also, what types of rules should be defined under the firewall? Are the default settings enough under a fairly secure Linux system enough, or does more need to be done?

When installing GUFW (if one goes that route), does the repository need to be updated (via sudo apt) before installation via the terminaL? More generally, does sudo apt- get updates need to be run each and every time a command is run through the terminal, or is it ok to pass on updating if you have ran sudo apt, say yesterday?

Thanks for all the help.

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Yes ufw is a command-line tool and gufw is the GUI version. Use the command:

sudo ufw enable

to enable the default firewall settings. This is set to deny incoming and allow out.

To make things easy, gufw allows you to make rules that allow or deny certain services etc. and is a frontend to ufw.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gufw

Yes, you should update the apt-get list in case there has been a security update since the last update. This way, you do not install and use an unstable or otherwise unsafe application.

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  • Can I go straight to GUFW or is it necessary to enable UFW first?
    – user300173
    Jul 3, 2014 at 17:36
  • @user300173 No, you do not need to enable ufw if you enable gufw. (yes, you can use gufw to enable ufw)
    – mchid
    Jul 3, 2014 at 17:46

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