Not too excited about diving into those intricate little scripts just to configure a basic firewall for your Linux box? Well, I recently discovered guarddog, a very useful GUI firewall configuration tool for Linux, written in KDE.

Till recently I was satisfied with Firestarter, but Firestarter offered very few configuration options beyond a few basics so I felt the need for a more powerful firewall tool in Linux. Enter guarddog.

Guarddog isn't really a stand-alone firewall application. It's a front-end configuration for the basic Linux firewall built right into the kernel. And what's more, with guarddog, you get a whole range of options: you can enable and disable individual network protocols (and you get a whole range of existing protocols already built into it) from different network zones, create new zones, create custom protocols and so on. You may find all those options a bit overwhelming at first, but it's fairly easy to get to know what you're doing once you understand a few simple concepts. In short, it's powerful, yet reasonably intuitive. But don't take my word for it: you can see it for yourself in the screenshots here.

If you find yourself needing a more customized firewall than the one offered by the rather basic firestarter but not too keen on doing it by editing configuration files manually, you might like to try guarddog.