[Discuss] Trying to connect to internet in Debian

[Randall Rose]

Unfortunately I am in a situation where I need to rebuild some machines with only a Debian and a Fedora install disk to work from.  With Debian, it's hard to connect to the internet since Debian doesn't like to provide a firewall in the initial install.

Here's what I tried with Debian 13:
1. install from DVD
2. go back to DVD, pull iptables .deb file (which the default install didn't set up) off DVD 
3. install iptables (version number is 1.8.11, using nf_tables)
4. fix sources.list so it points back to debian.org repositories
5. go to out-of-date Ubuntu machine that can't safely connect to internet since it's no longer supported, 
run ufw enable, dump output of iptables-save and ip6tables-save in text files (same version of iptables)
6. use those text files on Debian machine as input to iptables-restore and ip6tables-restore
7. turn on wifi connection
8. Result: on Debian machine, Firefox can't connect to any site, although the Software app claims it is can see that all updates are up to date.

Alternatively, starting at step 5, I can simply run "iptables -A INPUT -j DROP" and "ip6tables -A INPUT -j DROP" but I get the same result.

What am I doing wrong?  Looks like the firewall is too strict so that Firefox can't connect.