Firetable is an IPtablesfirewall script for Linux. It has no graphical interface. All the configuration is done via configurationfiles. This makes Firetable ideal for servers. In the configurationfiles, you can write normal sentences. Example:
accept incoming tcp to server:22
accept incoming udp from ntp.isp.com to domain:123
dnat tcp to server:80 -> webserver.lan
forward tcp to webserver.lan:80
This is of course much easier than the iptables commandline options.
Hiawatha is a secure webserver for Unix. It has been written with ‘being secure’ as its main goal. Hiawatha has many security features that no other webserver has. Its author claims that Hiawatha is the most secure webserver available.
Compile and run tests of Hiawatha have successfully been done on Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X and Cygwin. It’s very likely that Hiawatha will compile and run on other Unix-clones as well.
Why should you use Hiawatha instead of Apache? Well, Apache is a big fat cow and has a damn ugly configurationfile. And if you don’t have a website that needs HTTP features such as WebDAV, there is no reason to automaticly go for Apache. Especially not because everybody else does. Every webserver has its pros en cons. Hiawatha does not have all the fancy features, but it is very secure and fast and is really easy to configure. Rootjail, run CGIs under any uid/gid you want, prevention of SQL injection and cross-site scripting, banning of clients who try such exploits and many other features make Hiawatha an interesting webserver for those who need more security than what the other available webservers are offering.