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Firestarter was a package available through Debian that showed active connections (and a few other features which gufw does not have).

You could observe the log of attempts to connect and create rules to either block or allow similar connections by clicking on the log entries.

  1. Is there a way to get this sort of functionality now that Firestarter is not in active development and no longer an available Debian package?

  2. And are there ways to use firestarter with a VPN?

Ted Shaneyfelt
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sunwarr10r
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    Is there interest in collaborating to either resurrect firestarter or add features supporting this workflow to gufw? – Ted Shaneyfelt Oct 21 '21 at 22:57
  • @TedShaneyfelt I'd be interessted. But I'm also affraid this will might suck to much of my free time away ;-) – MadMike Oct 22 '21 at 13:30
  • This would be great! – sunwarr10r Oct 22 '21 at 14:39
  • It seems the options would be 1. Contact the authors/maintainers of both projects FireStarter and gufw to see if they would work together to merge code or algorithms & features in an existing project 2. Contact FireStarter author/maintainer and see if help is needed to get it back into maintained status and acceptable Debian as a standard project 3. Contact the gufw author/maintainer and see if they're interested in that functionality being added to their code 4. Fork off existing code 5. Start fresh with a modular approach so it could have text based (curses) or graphical UI. – Ted Shaneyfelt Oct 23 '21 at 04:46
  • I believe the problem was the project got stale, didn't keep up with something like GUI that got deprecated. I suspect it just sent commands to edit and read IP table entries or do so through UFW and follow logs, but did it in a very elegant manner by converting log entries into templates for rules that could be taken as is or generalized a bit. – Ted Shaneyfelt Oct 23 '21 at 04:50

1 Answers1

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It seems that firestarter is obsolete in Ubuntu.

It was shown in pkgs.org listings - Debian 7 (Wheezy) and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (EOL now), currently repology does not show any Debian-based distros.

Download link on official FireStarter site does not open.
But you can try to build (from this source) on 16.04 LTS ESM or 18.04 LTS:

sudo apt-get install build-essential bzr libglade2-dev libgnomeui-dev checkinstall
bzr branch lp:ubuntu/trusty/firestarter
cd firestarter
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall make install # change version to 1.0.3, release to 1, name to firestarter
sudo dpkg -i firestarter_1.0.3-1_amd64.deb
sudo firestarter

Self-compiled firestarter launches but writes many errors and warning to the terminal.

I think there was a reason of removing it from official repositories, so you should use gufw.

N0rbert
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    This question is currently being reviewed to reopen it: https://askubuntu.com/review/reopen/1178490 – karel Oct 22 '21 at 10:13