Re: Shorewall maintenance

On 2/8/25 12:58, Benny Pedersen wrote:
> Wayne Shumaker skrev den 2025-02-08 16:56:
>> At 2/6/2025 02:25 PM, Winston wrote:
>>
>>> Shorewall (and Shorewall6) has been fantastic to me, as a multi-ISP
>>> user.
> 
> if that debian maintaince stops, one can still find older slackware that
> still works, just remember to not keep using precompiled problems as
> debian mostly is, or even stupid centos
> 
> i prefer freebsd and gentoo for being fullt opensource and not
> precompiled at all
> 
> if shorewall will continue then ask how it could use nftables instaed of
> iptables, and why its essently better ?, the kernel part is just another
> cli to add it to kernel

Yeah, it doesn't seem to me to be an insurmountable problem to update 
shorewall to emit nftables rules instead of iptables rules, unless 
nftables is nearly unrecognizably different from iptables.

And if nftables IS nearly unrecognizably different from iptables, and 
yet they didn't incorporate a sanely human-readable layer into it during 
the rewrite, then perhaps that group of developers needs to not be in 
charge of Linux kernel firewalling any more.  There's a reason we 
program in high-level languages, and a reason why Photoshop and GIMP are 
not simply hex bitmap editors, and why OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not 
just a raw-XML editor.  The technology of translating human-readable 
instructions into machine-readable ones is around sixty years old now. 
We shouldn't still be having to configure firewalls in the firewall 
equivalent of machine code.


Shorewall is effectively a compiler for firewalls.  You'd think it 
wouldn't be the only one.



-- 
   Phil Stracchino
   Fenian House Publishing
   [email protected]
   [email protected]
   Landline: +1.603.293.8485
   Mobile:   +1.603.998.6958