[Discuss] Trying to connect to internet in Debian

[rrose at pobox.com (Randall Rose)]

Thanks, I appreciate your helpfulness and I can't really say any more than I 
already have.  

(I don't mean to exclude other people if others want to join in or reply 
further.)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026, at 10:44 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:07:10 -0500
> "Randall Rose" <rrose at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Rich,
>> 
>> Thanks, you make several good points.  
>> 
>> Most of my criticism of Debian still stands. The installer that is
>> run from the Debian iso does allow installing some features that will
>> listen to network traffic (though you can uncheck those options).
>
> So what? Debian lets you do a lot of things, but it NEVER holds your
> hand. If you choose to install something, the responsibility to get it
> right is yours.
>
> For what it's worth, I manage on the order of 3000 Linux machines,
> mostly RHEL and Ubuntu. First thing I do on every one is stop and
> disable the firewall service. These machines absolutely can connect to
> public Internet services. NONE have ever been compromised under my
> watch 
>
>> I want to make sure my point about ufw and iptables is clear.  I
>> definitely did not say I was mixing ufw and iptables in the sense of
>> running iptables commands on the same machine that runs ufw.  I hope
>
> From original post:
>>> run ufw enable, dump output of iptables-save and ip6tables-save in
>>> text files (same version of iptables)
>
> This is mixing iptables with ufw.
>
>> My question is why is that, after taking that ufw-derived set of
>> iptables commands and running them on a Debian machine that doesn't
>> have ufw, I still find that Firefox on that Debian machine can't
>> access any websites?  And since this ufw-derived approach (which does
>
> Because either your network configuration is incorrect to begin with,
> or because you mixed iptables with ufw and broke that. Or both, it
> could be both. You need to remove one of them in order to troubleshoot
> the other.
>
> -- 
> \m/ (--) \m/
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