[luau] RH 9 server hacked -- what went wrong?

[Mark Pettit]

>Good advice but do you know of any of the cheaper home units (SMC, 
>Netgear, Siemens, Dlink, Linksys etc..) that can actually be configured 
>with default DENY?  

Yes.  The Linksys routers are default deny.  You must specifically say
what ports are allowed in.

>Everyone I have seen is default allow and you block from there.  You can 
>block various things like IRC and SMTP but you have to do it manually.  I 
>have a few floppy linux routers that I mess with that are default DENY 
>but they each have disadvantages too.   
>A cheap self contained router/firewall that had the 
>ability to default deny, block by IP and range, block by DNS name, and 
>block by time period would be great.  While I'm dreaming, I'd also like 
>the ability of limiting the services forwarding fuction to specific ip's 
>instead of the firewall blindly forwarding selected ports over to another 
>machine, like now I forward ssh port 22 to my Linux machine but have to 
>maintain specific rules on that machine of where I can connect from, same 
>with port 80 to a second machine.

There is no consumer-level product that will do that.  However, Linux
iptables can do most, if not all, of what you are asking for.  And
they can be set up for relatively cheap; $100 or less if you buy a
used computer on ebay.

-- 
Mark K. Pettit
mark at pettit.org