The Chillidog Software Blog

The ramblings of a developer

Installing UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) in Debian Lenny

To install UFW in Debian 5.0 (Lenny) there are a couple gotchas that you will hit along the way.

  1. UFW requires Python 2.5 or greater.
  2. UFW requires make
  3. UFW does NOT automatically start at boot even though it says it does.

Here are the commands I ran on a clean install (as root).

  1. Update your package list: aptitude update
  2. Upgrade your distribution: aptitude safe-upgrade
  3. Install Python: aptitude install python
  4. Install build utils: aptitude install build-essential
  5. Move to a temp location: cd /tmp
  6. Get the latest from UFW: wgethttp://launchpad.net/ufw/0.29/0.29.3/+download/ufw-0.29.3.tar.gz
  7. Extract the source: tar xvf ufw-0.29.3.tar.gz
  8. Go into the source: cd ufw-0.29.3
  9. Install UFW: python setup.py install
  10. Configure UFW to boot with tips from here:ln -fs /lib/ufw/ufw-init /etc/init.d/ufw
  11. Configure rc.defaults:update-rc.d ufw defaults
  12. Enable UFW: ufw enable

NOTE if you do NOT have make installed you will get a “No such file or directory” error. This actually took me a little while (and digging in setup.py) to figure out.