I first read about Firewall Builder in Linux Journal a few months back, and it struck me as a handy little program. In a nutshell, Firewall Builder (aka fwbuilder) is a GUI tool designed to make setting up firewalling and routing policies easier on an admin.

Once you’ve created your firewall policies, fwbuilder spits out the resulting script. It works with iptables and ipchains, and it appears there are also modules for setting up Cisco PIX and OpenBSD pf firewalls. You don’t need to use fwbuilder on the end system, either; fwbuilder allows you to create several different scripts and export them to the firewalls. This way an admin can create and administer several different firewalls from one workstation.

Version 2.0.3 has just been released on October 1st and, like most of our favorite software, is licensed under the GPL. The GUI is built on Qt, so you will need the Qt libraries on your system. Downloads are available as source or as packages for several distros. There’s even a cookbook available to get you started.