That includes some of my more favorite subjects:
hardening
firewall policy
network address translation
port translation
and basic IP networking, to name a few.

By the way, I have been working with RedHat's built-in auto-installer. You
can 
build an entire box, including all recent patches and kernels, no
intervention
unless you want to, in under 30 minutes!!! Makes restoring a "hack-me"
system
a no brainer...

-----Original Message-----
From: J.D. Abolins [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 7:36 AM
To: Joseph Parente; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Proposal for next meeting


At 07:27 PM 3/14/02 -0500, Joseph Parente wrote:
 > I attended my first meeting the other night and
 > thought it was great.

Glad to hear that. Look forward to meeting you at the next meeting. (I was 
not able to come for the March meeting.)

 > Perhaps it's a little presumptuous of me to suggest
 > an agenda for the next meeting, but I'm interested
 > in fire walls and security and I thought that would
 > be a good subject for a discussion.

Not presumptuous to suggest a meeting topic.

Firewalls and security is very large topic. Perhaps breaking it into 
smaller chunks like iptables for one session, another aspect for another 
session. Somewhere, we could look at Bastille Linux security enhancement 
script.

There are also prepackage Linux based firewalls like SmoothWall which could 
be demoed.

If we had a "hack-me" PC available, preferably not somebody regular use 
system, we could try the scripts with Nessus and some recent exploits from 
SecurityFocus.com.

 > Than we could come up with an "official" HamLUG fire wall
 > script, one that could be configured for single machine,
 > router or what have you.

That's a tall order. Perhaps better to have two or three scripts according 
to people's needs. A paranoid penguin one that extensively blocks 
everything, a middle level, a Web server one, etc.

One thing about firewalls: they are a part of a comprehensive security 
process, not an end all. There are ways to get through firewalls. Linux, 
fortunately, does give a significant edge over Windows but there are some 
ways that linux systems with firewalls can get hacked, cracked, and wacked. 
Good sense in configuration and use of some other tools such as Snort 
and/or Tripwire can help.

J.D. Abolins



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