Distro-specific tools for enabling and managing firewalls are often aimed at a broad audience with a varying level of skills. They are thus designed to be approachable by less skilled or beginning administrators.

Examples of distro-specific or GUI-based configuration tools:

• Lokkit: Red Hat comes with Lokkit tool which is a command-line and Gnome GUI form and is very simple to use but is limited in what it can configure and do. A variety of other tools also exist ranging from simple to very complicated. All these tools are open source and free.

• Fwbuilder: A sophisticated multi-firewall (it also supports Cisco PIX, BSD pf and ipfilter) rule builder. It has a GUI interface and is designed to output complete, functional firewall configurations. It can be quite complicated to use and is not recommended for beginners.

• · NARC(Netfilter Automatic Rule Configurator): a Bash script which runs from the command line and allows you to configure iptables. It has a strong focus on helping you configure rules that handle abnormal traffic (for example, blocking Smurf attacks, IP spoofing and SYN floods).

• · Turtle Firewall: A Webmin-based firewall admin tool. It allows for the configuration of firewalls using an object-based system.

• · Firestarter: Another GUI-based firewall configuration tool. It is easier to use than many of the other tools and its interface is clear and simple to navigate and operate. It also contains a real-time event and connection view of your firewall that allows you to monitor your firewall from the tool.