. Firewalls

Firewalls are a means of controlling what information is allowed into and out of your local network. Typically the firewall host is connected to the Internet and your local LAN, and the only access from your LAN to the Internet is through the firewall. This way the firewall can control what passes back and forth from the Internet and your LAN.
There are a number of types of firewalls and methods of setting them up. Linux machines make pretty good firewalls. Firewall code can be built right into 2.0 and higher kernels. The user-space tools ipfwadm for 2.0 kernels and ipchains for 2.2 kernels, allows you to change, on the fly, the types of network traffic you allow. You can also log particular types of network traffic.
Firewalls are a very useful and important technique in securing your network. However, never think that because you have a firewall, you don't need to secure the machines behind it. This is a fatal mistake. Check out the very good Firewall-HOWTO at your latest metalab archive for more information on firewalls and Linux. http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Firewall-HOWTO.html
More information can also be found in the IP-Masquerade mini-howto: http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/mini/IP-Masquerade.html
More information on ipfwadm (the tool that lets you change settings on your firewall, can be found at it's home page: http://www.xos.nl/linux/ipfwadm/
If you have no experience with firewalls, and plan to set up one for more than just a simple security policy, the Firewalls book by O'Reilly and Associates or other online firewall document is mandatory reading. Check out http://www.ora.com for more information. The National Institute of Standards and Technology have put together an excellent document on firewalls. Although dated 1995, it is still quite good. You can find it at http://csrc.nist.gov/nistpubs/800-10/main.html. Also of interest:

• The Freefire Project -- a list of freely-available firewall tools, available at http://sites.inka.de/sites/lina/freefire-l/index_en.html
• SunWorld Firewall Design -- written by the authors of the O'Reilly book, this provides a rough introduction to the different firewall types. It's available at http://www.sunworld.com/swol-01-1996/swol-01-firewall.html
• Mason - the automated firewall builder for Linux. This is a firewall script that learns as you do the things you need to do on your network! More info at: http://www.pobox.com/~wstearns/mason/