Firewall config tool (again)

Tyler Larson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.configuration
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Over the past year, there have been a handful of announcements from 
people who have begun work on their own version of 
system-config-firewall--starting with my own "fireconf" about a year ago.

Well, I'm at it again. I've started over, and this time I'm doing it 
right. I've been following the spec I wrote with Brent's suggestions 
(http://www.tlarson.com/fireconf) almost religiously. So far, I'm *very* 
impressed with the results.

The focus of this project is flexibility, embedability, and modularity. 
Parts of the program can be loaded and used by any other python app, and 
command line options allow you to do pretty much anything with or 
without interacting with the GUI.  So far, I've written the backend (the 
module framework and the iptables stuff), with a sample module ("Set-up 
internet connection sharing").

What I'm wondering is if there are any specific suggestions you might 
have that should go into the framework of the app. Specifically, I've 
never written a module interface in python, and what I've got may or may 
not be the most optimal thing there is. Python handles a lot of stuff 
for you, so what I've come up with looks a lot like this:

def RunModule(module_name, firewall, **args):
    mod = __import__(module_name)
    return mod.Main(firewall, args)

--where "firewall" is an easy-to-use object that contains everything 
there is to know about the firewall--tables, chains, rules, etc.  If 
someone has any logical reason why to use a different method, run it by 
me.  Remember that in this tool, all the modules do is manipulate the 
firewall--answer queries, make changes, that kind of thing. Stuff like 
loading, saving, and activating a particular ruleset is handled by the 
framework.

Oh, and since the question invariably comes up--using an existing 
firewall configuration tool (sadly) isn't an option. None of the tools 
out there (firestarter and fwbuilder included) offer the required 
ability to integrate into existing configuration tools. There are other 
objections as well, search the archives if you're interested.

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