Firestarter

Firestarter Manual

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Preferences

Preferences

The preferences allow you to customize Firestarter to your liking.

The preferences dialog is broken down into subsections accessed trough the list on the far left. Currently there are three sections affecting the program: General, Filters and Advanced. The other 5 sections directly effect the firewall settings: External device, Connection Sharing, Services, ICMP Filtering and Type of Service. These 5 sections are the same as the pages in the wizard, see the wizard manual page for more information on these.

General Preferences

Settings in this section affect the general operation of the program.

Start firewall on program startup: If you check this the firewall will be automatically restarted each time you start Firestarter. It is recommended that this setting is used.

Stop firewall on program exit: In normal operation the firewall will keep functioning even after you exit the Firestarter client program. Enabling this feature ensures that the Firewall is stopped when the client terminates.

Autoresolve IP numbers to hostnames for hits: With this option on, every hit that shows up in the client will be automatically resolved to a valid hostname, if such an resolution is possible. Because of threading issues in the current version of Firestarter, enabling this might cause short periods of unresponsiveness in the client. The problem is cosmetic, the actual firewall is not affected by this. Note that the tray application always shows the resolved name of the last hit regardless of this setting.

Filtering Preferences

These settings can drastically cut down on the amount of hits that are presented to you in the hits view. Note that these filters only affect the representation in the Hits view, the actual hits are still logged to disk even if they are not shown. Cutting down on the logging to disk can be accomplished using the "Block port" rules.

Filter out redundant hits: This option will employ some simple heuristic methods against the hits to weed out series of similar consecutive hits. It is highly recommended to use this option.

Filter out hits not meant for you: With this option enabled the destination of all hits are matched against your IP address. If the two don't match you won't get an notification of the hit on the hit view. This effectively filters out most harmless "garbage" traffic hits that just happen to reach your machine, but are not specifically targeted to you, for example broadcasting services. If you enable this filter you will get an very effective view of hits targeted directly at your machine; these are the hits to take seriously.

Advanced Preferences

The settings in this section are meant for expert users only. Some of the options might cause the firewall to not work properly. If you make any changes here you must rerun the wizard for the changes to take effect.

Enable experimental options: With this on you will gain access to some undocumented advanced options. Not for the faint of hearth.

Try to detect the location of system binaries: Firestarter needs access to some common system tools. With this option on Firestarter will try to detect the location of these binaries. _Do not enable this_, unless you have your system tools in some very non-standard place and the firewall is not working properly.

Preferred packet rejection method: This setting controls how to respond to firewall hits;

Letting the remote host know that a packet has been rejected can potentially give out a lot of information about the various rules on the system, therefore we highly recommend you keep this setting on Deny.

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