alejandro, this is a complicated question, no different than if you had asked if the bmw 3-series is better than the mercedes c-series or the such and such X-series ...
ipfilter is a general purpose kernel layer packet filter with several built-in application proxies. features of ipf include intelligent stateful filtering and, i feel most importantly, singularity of purpose. ipf strengths (in my eyes): + free. + stable. (*) + config file is easy to understand. + rules are easy to implement. + features + large user community. + multiple OS support. + good FAQ content. :*) ipf weaknesses (in my eyes): - managability across multiple machines. - developer resources. - releases are tested by users. (*) (*) isn't that an interesting (yet nice) dichotomy ? you'll notice that i'm not in the "it doesn't have a GUI" camp. i've been doing just fine with unix's "config file" methodology for quite some time, and i'm in no hurry to find a better solution to my non-problem. all packet layer firewalls suffer from user education issues; a pretty GUI may help, but in the end if you haven't read at least chapter 1 of "TCP/IP Illustrated" [stevens] you are at best shooting in the dark. you'll also notice that i did not put "performance" either as a strength or weakness. i've not run into a situation where i've had a problem in this area, and if i did, well, bigger [intel|sparc] CPUs get cheaper every second. thus unless you are running more than 200Mb/s through ipf, i don't think you are going to have a problem with performance. and so it goes with any software based routing firewall. n.b. refer to http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ipfilter&m=98437341427833&w=2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ipfilter&m=98437538230253&w=2 FW-1 and sunscreen, neither of which i have played with for more than 10 minutes, do things differently. are they better or worse? in some cases the breath of their functionallity makes them "better" but then again there are only so many ways to implement the software-based routing firewall idea. you or your organization may require the features (or perhaps the contracted support) of these commercial products -- but that's up to you and your accountant to decide upon. maybe you should start by asking yourself what you want from your firewall and pick a product based on those parameters. clearly there is a market for software like ipf (and FW-1 and so forth) but people are also buying purpose-designed hardware from lucent (Brick) and cisco (PIX) and the like. for every rain there is an Ark. jim ps anyone have ipf running on ppc HW? w/ what OS? Alejandro Cabrera Obed wrote:
Hi !!! Can you tell me if IPFILTER is more, less or equal powerful than others firewall or similar software as Firewall-1, SunScreen, etc... ??? What are IPFilter's main advantages ??? I use Sun / Solaris 7. Thanks a lot, regards !!! Alejandro Cabrera Obed E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
