(This article was edited by Mike Horn)

In the past I've already published articles and interviews on FSM about Firewall Builder (or FWB in short). The reason is simple: the tool kept evolving during the years, improving the features it already had and adding interesting new ones.

During these years I've not being using the tool regularly since I am not a Network Administrator. But I can say that every time I had a firewalling problem at hand, where I needed to prototype and test iptables configurations quickly, this tool never betrayed me!

This time we'll talk about how FWB helps you to configure multiple firewalls in a consistent way. We won't be talking about firewalling per se, so you can still benefit from reading this article even if you don't have deep firewalling, networking or security knowledge.

The examples in this article are based on Firewall Builder v4.2. NetCitadel recently announced the release of Firewall Builder 5 which includes some minor changes in the GUI, so some screenshots in this article may look slightly different from what you would see in v5.

As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.

About two years ago I published an article about Firewall Builder. Now that the version 3.0 is out I had a catch-up interview with its creator, Vadim Kurland, and I discovered a number of new interesting features.

MM: Hi Vadim, and thanks for answering my questions. You are the main author of Firewall Builder (FWB), but your name seldom appears even on the website www.fwbuilder.org. So, just before we start diving deep in FWB, would you like to briefly introduce yourself?

I have been saying this for many years: free software must not be associated with an ideology or political party. Doing that would:

1. be an utter falsity;
2. damage our ability to advocate.

I am not the only one with this opinion! As you may know, we'll have elections in Italy next Sunday and Monday, and the Italian Association for Free Software is now promoting two remarkable initiatives.

Lately I've been working on an updated version of the comparison between Skype and Wengophone I wrote on June 2006 for Free Software Magazine. While I was working on it, I spotted a number of rather worrying signs:

One popular screensaver in Ubuntu is “Floating Ubuntu”, which displays a number of Ubuntu logos floating around the screen. This screensaver exists in many different flavours; for example in Ubuntu you can also find “Floating Feet”, that has the GNOME logo instead of Ubuntu’s; or, on Debian you have Debian’s “swirls” floating around. I thought that it would probably be easy to customize it and have an image of my choice floating around instead. Unfortunately, screensavers in Ubuntu are not configurable using the GUI so I had to hack the screensaver myself. Here’s how I did it.

Have you ever wanted to configure a personal firewall for your GNU/Linux box, but were scared of the complexity of iptables? Well, I might not be able to make you a security expert, but I can show you a tool that will help you to configure your personal firewall the easy way. The secret? Firewall Builder (also known as fwbuilder for short).

For the few that liked my blog and, after a couple of months of silence, thought that I was dead... well I am alive and kicked (no that’s not a typo; I know it should be “kicking”, but the reality is that I feel like I’ve been kicked in my back). What happened... well, a lot of work and, finally, a two-week holiday in Brittany kept me out of the real World. And, now that I am back, I am taking a look around. A number of new interesting news items stand out from the rest.

Update: March 12th, 2007: The 2.1 RC1 is officially out. Go get it

With voice and video calls, file transfer capability and support for almost every instant messaging system on the planet, Wengophone candidates itself as the main free software competitor to Skype. With the 2.0 release, a pretty unstable, beta quality release, they failed the first attempt. What about the second?

Those of you that are fans of car racing will probably recognize this post's title as the famous phrase that gives the official start to the Indianapolis 500. If it happens that you are a fan of both car racing and free software, you may well be interested in TORCS (The Open Racing Cars Simulator).