Managing your Firewall with APF and BFD
The Internet can be a very dangerous place for a server sitting online without the protection of a firewall. However, setting up an iptables ruleset manually can be intimidating, and it is easy to make mistakes. APF (Advanced Policy Firewall), along with its companion application BFD (Brute Force Detection), are two useful security tools developed by Rfx Networks Projects that can help to simplify this process.
APF is a firewall system that utilises the latest features from the iptables(netfilter) project to provide a robust, but easy to manage, firewall. BFD parses the server logs for failed logon attempts. Once a preconfigured number of failures from an IP address have been recorded (25 is the default), it blocks the IP address by adding it to the APF deny list.
