HOWTO_TuxGuardian

This article is part of the HOWTO series.

Installation • Kernel & Hardware • Networks • Portage • Software • System • X Server • Gaming • Non-x86 • Emulators • Misc

1 Introduction
2 Installation
3 Usage
4 Troubleshooting
5 References

Introduction

TuxGuardian is a great application centric firewall akin to ZoneAlarm or the late Sygate Personal firewalls for windows. TuxGuardian comes in 3 parts: a kernel module, a server daemon, and a QT GUI frontend.

Find out more at the TuxGuardian Website

Unfortunately, it isn't very stable. (Version 0.4 just came out, but I haven't tried installing it yet.)

Note: Tuxguardian 0.5 is in the Sunrise Overlay as of June 2008

Installation

Requirements

As of TuxGuardian 0.3 -requires Kernel 2.6.10+ -If you want the graphical front end, you will also need QT 3.1+

emerge -av qt

Download and Extract

There is no ebuild for tuxguardian, you will need to extract and compile the program manually. In the example below, I'm using TuxGuardian 0.3 If you have downloaded a newer version, you will need to substitute different filenames

as root

cd /
cd mkdir tuxguardian

download and save the source tarbal to /tuxguardian

cd /tuxguardian
tar xzf tuxguardian-0.3.tar.gz

Compile

First you'll have to fix the qt paths for the frontend by editing its Makefile:

cd /tuxguardian/tuxguardian-0.3
nano -w frontend/Makefile

Edit line 21 to look like that:

INCPATH  = -I/usr/qt/3/mkspecs/linux-g++ -I. -I$(QTDIR)/include -I.ui/ -I. -I.moc/

and line 108 should look like that:

Makefile: tg-frontend.pro  /usr/qt/3/mkspecs/linux-g++/qmake.conf

Now the frontend should compile fine.

The second thing to fix is the module compilation. First we get this patch (BIG thanks to jengelh for that one!)

wget http://jengelh.hopto.org/f/tuxguardian-0.3-for-2.6.15.diff

or from mirror

wget http://free.pages.at/gimpel/tuxguardian-0.3-for-2.6.15.diff

and patch it in with

patch -p1 < tuxguardian-0.3-for-2.6.15.diff

Finally you can compile and install everything with

make
su
make install

Usage

You will need to run the daemon, install the module, and run the frontend all as root

as root

tg-daemon & 
modprobe tuxg
tg-frontend &

Troubleshooting

tg-daemon occasionally freezes. If this happens, restart it with:

$ su
# killall tg-daemon tg-frontend && tg-daemon & tg-frontend

At least on Gnome this can materialize itself as windows programs failing to launch and networked apps failing to connect/loosing connections. In the term window you may see something like

Tue Jan 24 20:56:03 2006
   Query from module wants to know if
      PERMIT_APP /usr/libexec/netspeed_applet2
       with hash 597585152b18fd41f0bcd8b14611d03a
   Checking the permissions for the application..
   Daemon configured to PERMIT this APP

Tue Jan 24 20:56:33 2006

Tue Jan 24 20:57:03 2006

The repeated dates seem to signify it is no longer responding to requests from the module.