2015-11-24 Update

Guarddog is very outdated and requires pulling in too many dependencies, I recommend (and use) ipkungfu as a replacement.

Background

I’ve used Guarddog as my “soft” firewall for several years and have grown to appreciate its simplicity and power as an iptables/ipchains front-end. I was surprised to find Ubuntu 11.04 removed Guarddog from the repos but after a bit of digging I found it has not been under any significant development for several years (2.6.0 was released on March 11th, 2007 - simonzone.com). This does not, however, mean that Guarddog no longer works or is not effective.

After a brief stint in trying to use UFW and/or iptables I found I do not have the time or patience to learn another tool and generally just want something to get it done quickly. In that spirit, I decided to go back to Guarddog, now I just needed to figure out how…

Details

The following steps are how I installed Guarddog in Ubuntu 11.04

• First, you will want to ensure UFW (or any other local firewall app) is disabled to avoid issues, for UFW, you can check if it is active via the following command: $ sudo ufw status If you get a response other than ‘Status: inactive’, issue the following command to disable UFW: $ sudo ufw disable
• Download Guarddog (I got the .deb file from archive.ubuntu.com as its a trusted source, you can always get it from Guarddog official website)
• Guarddog requires kdelibs4c2a so you’ll want to install it first: $ sudo apt-get install kdelibs4c2a
• Install Guarddog: $ sudo dpkg -i guarddog_2.6.0-2.1ubuntu3_amd64.deb

You may also want to check out our Guide to Using Guarddog as a Firewall post.

Notes

One thing to note about installing this way is that you will not get notices of updates to guarddog as you just installed it manually. This is not a problem for me as 1) guarddog is not being actively developed and 2) guarddog is not in the Ubuntu repo so you wont be getting updates anyway.