firewall on freebsd

[Michael H. Semcheski]

On Friday 24 June 2005 10:59 am, Ean Kingston wrote:
> IPF was written for OpenBSD and later ported to FreeBSD. IPF came into
> existence because of disagreements between certain members of the OpenBSD
> team and the author of IPFilter. Filtering is done in the kernel and I
> believe NAT is also in-kernel.

The OpenBSD packet filter is known as pf, not ipf.  It exists in FreeBSD as 
pf.

I have to say that I find it has some very useful features, though they are 
outside the mainstream firewall feature set.  For instance, authpf.  When you 
log into the firewall (usually via ssh), if the account's login type shell is 
authpf, a special set of firewall rules get loaded for the IP address the 
client is connecting from.

I have used pf and ipfw, and they're both fine.  If I had to pick, I'd choose 
pf because I like that it uses a seperate configuration file, rather than a 
shell script to load its rules.

I'm not an expert on either.

Mike