Set up a Firewall with Firestarter

Introduction
One of the great features included in Linux is the IPtables firewall. Unfortunately, its command-line use is rather complex, and it can be intimidating for even experienced Linux users to configure it. Firestarter is a friendly graphical interface that allows you to configure a software firewall in Linux using the built-in IPtables/IPchains utilities.

http://www.techthrob.com/tech/firestarter.php

Highlight Your Shell Prompt When Working as Root

by Mitch Frazier

A useful thing that some distros have started doing is setting the color of your shell prompt differently if you're logged in as root. This gives you an additional visual cue that helps avoid doing things as root when you don't want to. If your distro doesn't do this for you, you can accomplish it by changing your .bashrc files. To set the color of your shell prompt you set the shell variable PS1.

To make the prompt red when you're running as root add this to /root/.bashrc:

PS1="\[\e[31m\]\h:\w#\[\e[m\] "

To make the prompt green when running as a normal user add this to ~/.bashrc:

PS1="\[\e[32m\]\u@\h:\w\$\[\e[m\] "

See the shell man page and search the web for ANSI Escape codes for more info on the meaning of the escape sequences.

In the image below the top shell window is a normal user, the bottom one is a root window.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/hig ... ing-root-0