Transparent Proxies in Squid
With, the extremely uncontrollable growth in the number of Hackers, not only system administrators of servers have
to worry about the security of their system, but even if you are running a standalone PPP Linux box, you simply cannot afford to ignore your system's security.
If your system is the main server which communicates with the external untrusted network called the Internet, or even if you simply use your linux box to connect to your ISP and surf the net through PPP, then you should definitely think about installing a firewall on your system.
The preferable and the best option in this case is to install a commercial firewall. However, this option is not always possible and is more often than not unnecesarry. Buying, installing and configuring a good commercial firewall is not only expensive but most beginners find it pretty formidable. OK, I do not want to go through the hassle of a commercial firewall, what do I do? Well, 'ipchains' hold the key for you.
The Firewalling code in the Linux Kernel chnaged considerably after the release of Kernel 2.2. Since then, a lot of new utilites and features have been added. Amongst these improvements, is a kewl feature called 'ipchains', which is primariarly used for configuring the firewalling rules and other such related details.
