> With the impending release of Shorewall 3.4, I have begun thinking about > where we go from here. The following are some thoughts about the current > state of Shorewall and possibilities for the future. > > Activity on the mailing lists and IRC channel has been steadily declining > for the last couple of years.
Hi Tom, I'm not sure Shorewall usage has declined over the years. That may be true for those trying to protect their personal systems, maybe they are now simply using their distributions "firewall" functionality. For those building real firewalls, I don't know which tool could be used instead of Shorewall. > 1) No GUI (other than Webmin). That is something that I personally am Not having a GUI is perfectly fine for me. > 2) Performance and scaling issues. Shorewall is being used in larger and > more complex configurations and the time required to run the generated > script increases non-linearly with configuration complexity. This has > been a common theme on the mailing list recently. Performance of the > shell-based compiler is also awful when dealing with large complex > configurations. I'm in the good situation that performance has never been a problem for me. Maybe that's because I try to keep too much complexity away from my firewalls and because I have some nice hardware for the larger setups. My question is whether it's possible to use perl for some kind of Shorewall-accelerator. I mean if it would be possible to create a simple shell to perl converter which then runs perl instead of the shell and does exactly the same, then it could be used whenever perl is available, otherwise a shell would be used. As always, I want to thank Tom for a very nice and well maintained product. Simon ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Shorewall-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/shorewall-devel
