New pf install on Freebsd7 seem to be a slow starter.

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 05:11:50PM +0200, Max Laier wrote:
> On Thursday 17 July 2008 15:28:49 CZUCZY Gergely wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:13:03 -0400
> >
> > "Glen Barber" <glen.j.barber at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Glen Barber <glen.j.barber at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> > > > I was under the assumption the OP runs his own DNS server, as that
> > > > is how my machine was set up.
> > >
> > > Another reason I thought about 'why' the OP used tables - aren't PF
> > > tables evaluated at boot, and macros evaluated when they are called?
> > > I think the latter negates the need for resolving at boot.  Please
> > > correct me if I am wrong.
> >
> > Macros are evaluated at pfctl-time. That means, parse-time. Tables are
> > evaluated at runtime (that means, when a lookup is in progress).
> 
> DNS lookups are always performed in userland at pfctl-time.  It does not 
> matter if you put your hostnames into a macro, table or rule directly - 
> it will always be looked up by pfctl before even loading the rule/table 
> into the kernel.
> 
> If you really want to trust DNS lookups to influence your firewall rules 
> (3 weeks till dooms day - is your resolver patched?!?) you should add an 
> rc.d that depends on NETWORKING (or hook something up to ppp.linkup, or 
> whereeverelse you can be sure that your resolver is working) and fill a 
> predefined table from that script. i.e. "pfctl -t mytable -T add 
> foo.bar.local"

Which induces another question (probably answered in a post a few weeks
ago, knowing my luck):

Does pf(4) use gethostbyname()?  If so, the OP should be able to add
entries of said FQDNs to /etc/hosts to avoid doing actual recursive DNS
lookups.  (I'm curious about this myself, since we have some pf.conf
rules which refer to IPs bound to our servers, and I've always wanted
to switch them over to FQDNs that are listed in /etc/hosts...)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |