What are available iptables management tools with GUI

Last updated on November 15, 2013 by Dan Nanni

Netfilter is a packet filtering system within the Linux kernel used for intercepting and processing network packets. iptables is a user-space program that relies on netfilter to implement stateless/stateful packet filtering for network firewalls, and address/port translation for NATs. There are many applications and tools that ease complex iptables management tasks with higher-level interfaces via either command-line interfacces (e.g., CSF or firewalld) or graphical front-ends.

The following guide presents some of GUI-based iptables management tools.

Shorewall

Shorewall is one of the most powerful and flexible iptables configuration tool. Shorewall provides a high level abstraction of iptables rules, making it easy to manage complex firewall settings and edit iptables rules. While standalone Shorewall relies on plain-text configuration files to operate, there is a separate Webmin module for Shorewall with graphical front-ends.

Firestarter

Firestarter is an open-source graphical interface for Netfilter and iptables. Besides standard firewall settings, Firestarter features a monitoring interface that reports firewall status (e.g., blocked connections and active connections being tracked) in real-time.

Firewall Builder

Firewall Builder (or fwbuilder) is an open-source GUI firewall configuration and management tool available for Linux, FreeBSD, MS Windows, and Mac OS X. Fwbuilder supports GUI-based configurations for iptables (Linux), ipfilter (FreeBSD), ipfw (FreeBSD/MacOS), as well as Cisco ASA/PIX firewalls, to generate firewall rulesets to be used on a target machine. It comes with a set of predefined firewall ruleset templates for commonly used firewall deployments.

Gufw

Gufw (short for "GUI for Uncomplicated Firewall") is an easy-to-use GUI firewall manager for Debian/Ubuntu desktops. If all you need is simple firewall rules such as allowing/blocking ports for incoming/outgoing traffic, gufw will be probably sufficient for you.

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