Firestarter detection issue

[Agustíne]

Hey guys im using the Firestarter firewall for my computer.I am running Ubuntu 9.04 on my pc.Today my computer froze for a while when i was in the middle of purchasing something online,so i restarted my computer.I turned on Firestarter after the reboot.My problem is it kept showing various detections from many different ip addresses ever since that time,this has got me worried for the security of my computer especially since i was in the middle of an online transaction.Is this normal behavious for Firestarter or do i have a reason to be worried for the security of my pc??please help.

[Devasis]

You dont need to worry much,the reason you get so many detections is possibly because some of the left over dead connections are still being detected by it as TIME_WAIT.You probably had some torrent client running in the background or some updates being run because of which you got the detections.If you configured Firestarter to block unknown incoming connections then rest assured they will be blocked so don't sweat it.

[Solomon]

Firestarter is just a front end application for iptables and even if you started Firestarter after rebooting and not before it since it is not self starting anyways,dont worry iptables is already running in the background to work the way you configured it to using Firestarter.If you are still a bit wary then do this,download and install rKhunter if you dont have it already,it is a rootkit hunter and will warn you have you have any back door programs installed on your pc.It will also warn about any modified files and permissions on your system.

[Calvin K]

Since you are worried so much and clearly seem uncomfortable with Firestarter i suggest you try Gufw which a very good alternative and which i found very useful.iptables is a very good tool by itself, but it's syntax can get very tough some times and hard to understand for a normal user with no computer background,so to configure it Gufw is a very good front end GUI application.It is very easy to use and you can very easily block,allow and manage the connections to your computer.