Diary and notebook of whatever tech problems are irritating me at the moment.

20130304

Latest batch of UFW application profiles

I'm working on an updated kickstart script for Ubuntu 12.04 and it's late as usual.  Part of the reason was the Unity/Gnome3/Linux Mint/Xfce desktop environment choice problem.  Trying to select one that my customers would like, would work with full-screen 3D games, and my personal non-Xinerama multi-head (aka "Zaphod mode") desktop configuration has been difficult.  I also was dragged into one of the largest CAD projects of my career which took about 5x longer to finish than estimated (mostly not my fault). It paid well but at 70+ hours per week it really messed up the schedules of my other projects.

One of the major developments of the 10.04 installation was the creation of a bunch of application profiles for use with UFW, the "Uncomplicated FireWall".  I submitted these to Ubuntu for inclusion in future releases.  After some initial enthusiasm on the part of their developers for the contribution, the profiles have been more or less forgotten about.

There are multiple GUI interfaces for UFW but at the time only ufw-frontends supported profiles well.  About a week ago a member of the Gufw team contacted me about including the profiles as part of their package.  They also found some errors.  I'm not sure what their current version looks like but hopefully it supports the reference and category extensions to the file format I added.

One thing the profiles didn't have was a license.  After some consideration I settled on GNU GPL v3 or later.  Even though the profiles are not source code or configuration files related to compiling, the GPL can be used.

Because of all this I've updated the profiles to v1.4 and now include a license file and MD5 checksums for identifying which files are covered by the GPL.


About Me

Omnifarious Implementer = I do just about everything. With my usual occupations this means anything an electrical engineer does not feel like doing including PCB design, electronic troubleshooting and repair, part sourcing, inventory control, enclosure machining, label design, PC support, network administration, plant maintenance, janitorial, etc. Non-occupational includes residential plumbing, heating, electrical, farming, automotive and small engine repair. There is plenty more but you get the idea.