I would recommend taking a look at Shorewall 
<http://www.shorewall.net/>.  I can't stand dealing with IPTables myself 
but Shorewall simplifies the process.  Its still not as easy as some of 
the GUI tools such as Firestarter, but once you read through the 
tutorials and the getting started guides then you should be able to 
perform most things pretty easily.

-Adam

On 4/7/2010 7:15 PM, Andrew Berg wrote:
> I've never set up a firewall on Linux before and after reading around on
> the internet, I'm still lost. I'm trying to make it so that only certain
> hosts can access the system with some being able to access certain
> services and not others. It seems simple enough, so I tried using
> hosts.allow/hosts.deny, but I can still access the the FTP server even
> if I have a line such as vsftpd:<my IP address>. I don't really
> understand xinetd and iptables is way over my head and definitely
> overkill for what I want to do. This is a headless server (running
> Debian squeeze) that I do not have physical access to, so no GUIs and I
> need to be very careful not to lock myself out.
>
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