Using lokkit to handle your firewall.

Some common thing is to turn of the firewall if a freshly installed machine isn't reachable from the outside, as fidling with iptables is not everyones passion.

lokkit is another way to open some ports to the public.

Just use

$ sudo lokkit --list-services

to see what services/ports can be managed/opened using lokkit. For me it's quite common to open ports for ssh, ipsec and mdns afer a fresh installation

$ sudo lokkit -s ssh
$ sudo lokkit -s mdns
$ sudo lokkit -s ipsec

Let's see if there will be something new in the near future to handle - somtimes quite complex (see virtualization) - iptable setups.

Securing peer connections using IPSec

If some application or transport protocol doesn't specify a way to encrypt it's contents, it might be still enough to encrypt a lower layer.

IPSec is a way to encrypt IP packets (actually it is an alternative to IP).

The script after the break can be used to secure a connection - like an RTSP stream - between two peers using a pre shared key (psk).