Good Information about ipfw

[Christopher Weimann]

On 06/01/2004-11:59PM, Martes G Wigglesworth wrote:
> Is there a good, definitive, source of information for implementing ipfw
> firewall rules.  I had to research for almost a week just to find out
> how to do bandwidth limiting with freebsd.  (3days just to find out if
> freebsd does this, and then another two just to find out what dummynet
> is, and then I found out that it was in the man page.)  Where is the
> list of all these obscure programs, and features, that are not a
> unreadable as most man pages.  
> 

Where did you look?  I just spent about 2 minutes and found question
12.22 in the FreeBSD FAQ "Where can I get a bandwidth management tool?"

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/networking.html#BANDWIDTH-MGR-TOOL

> I would also like to know what the point of most manpages are.  90
> percent of them just list abitrary commands, as though you are supposed
> to know how to use the program in the first place.  There are almost
> never any useful informatin about implementing the program that the
> manpage is supposed to explain, but does not. 
> 

Man pages typically references not tutorials. They list ALL the command
line options for the programs they document not arbitrary ones.

> I have not been able to locate any book on the one firewall, that seems
> to be at the heart of any good Freebsd firewall setup. 
> 

Try 'man firewall'.

I would also suggest browse the FreeBSD FAQ 

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/index.html

and the FreeBSD handbook.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

If these things don't cover what you are looking for they will at least
piont you in the right direction.  Next would be google.  For example...

A google search for 'FreeBSD ipfw' comes up with several related
hits specifically http://www.freebsd-howto.com/HOWTO/Ipfw-HOWTO
looks like it may help you ( I have not read it so I don't know 
how good it is )

A google for 'FreeBSD dummynet' yeilds this page about dummynet.
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/