Clarkconnect/ClearOS fileserver....firewall needed?

[Satyrist]

As I'm switching out a fileserver that I had been running Linux Mint 7 on, (things are broken in a variety of ways and I'm just not interested in trying to triage it...But if I had to guess, an update didn't complete, and has broken several things...sudo and dpkg being a couple of them.) I'm going to be moving back over to ClearOS, as I had a much better experience with it.

For something that's simply serving files locally, is installing the firewall/Intrusion Detection modules necessary? The hardware would probably be able to run that along with samba, I wasn't looking to be doing routing/DHCP duties as well.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If your network has some kind of firewall I probably wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Brazen]

Firewalls on local linux boxes are pretty much just a feel-good measure anyway. It shouldn't be listening on any ports other than what is needed for things you actually use, such as samba, ssh, and maybe web if there is a web interface, all of which you'll open on the firewall anyway.

There are more advanced things you can do with the iptables firewall, but that's probably not applicable here.

It also depends on how secure your network is. If you have an unencrypted wireless access point on your network, you probably want to put more security on your individual boxen.