Hi Chaps

I am trying to set up a Squid proxy server on this (FC4) machine and, although it works fine on this PC, I cannot access the proxy from any other machine (although I can ping this IP from the other machines).

In order to narrow down the possible problems I would like to (temporarily) disable the firewall in FC4.

How exactly do I do this?

Thanks in advance for your help...

Mark

I used to use FC4, and although I can't remember the exact name of the menu, it's 'Services' or 'Servers' or something like that. Gives you a gui screen to start, stop, and restart such things. You need to temporarily stop iptables.

Thanks RickH,

That did the trick!

It is indeed the Firewall (Iptables) that is stopping access to the Squid proxy from my other machines.

Now all I need to do is work out how I allow them through. Unfortunately Iptables is a complete black art to me...

Any ideas?

Thanks again

Mark

Firewalls are indeed, wizardry. I have dabbled in iptables a little bit, but you wouldn't want any specific advice from me.

I would check out some gui firewall interfaces:
firestarter (Gnome)
guarddog (KDE)

I keep meaning to check out shorewall, but haven't yet.

My advice would be to figure out how to frame your question succintly, and put it on the 'Security' forum here. One of the reasons I switched to Debian was that I discovered it's a lot easier to get help on the Distros (Debian) forum than here.

Thanks for the advice RickH,

I set up a Gentoo box some time ago and I used Shorewall as the firewall on that - mainly because I was scared silly of using Iptables! - and found it to be very good (using a setup walkthrough from the Gentoo forum).

As for the others you mention I've not come across them but I'll check them out.

Thanks again.

Mark

Shorewall is nice too... Nice easy to read and edit config files. The gui interface I used was limitted, but editting the configs made it a useful firewall...

Then I shifted firewalling over to the smoothwall box...

not sure if this will help you...but it worked for me.....

I use delegate as a proxy in my machine....

if squid uses port 8080 i will do this

/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --destination-port 8080 -j ACCEPT

this will open the port on the squid machine so you can use the proxy.....

I modified this code from http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...ion_notes.html

I did exactly that and i was able to use the proxy from my other machine.....

If I understand correctly, you want to open port 8080 on your machine. I also can't seem to figure out iptables, but in the fedora command line, as root, typesetup, and the firewall configuration, which will let you configure specific ports to allow.
But, I suspect that piforever's solution, if it works for you, is the more elegant solution.

Well thanks Kurt,

But RickH - If you're still listening - Especially thanks to you..

Following RickH's posting (see above) I checked out "Firestarter" and essentially this has solved my problems - I now have a working (and usable) proxy!

Thanks to all...

p.s.

Although Firestarter works on this FC4 machine it gives some strange error messages at boot-up time (it says IPtable support is not enabled in the kernel - which of course it is) On first launching of the GUI Firestarter app it says the firewall failed to start - and then starts...

Anyone else use Firestarter on FC4? - should I be worried about these "errors"?

Thanks again.