ipfw vs. ipf on a freebsd router

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-10-18 15:10, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> I'm putting together a freebsd router to sit between my LAN and a T1.
> The current router (still running BSD/OS) uses BSDI's ipfw, but that
> died when BSDI did.  It's about as simple a routing job as one could
> ask, a T1 with a static address to a LAN with a static /24.
> 
> I have a whole bunch of packet filtering rules on the current router
> to keep out nasty stuff based partly on port numbers but also a couple
> of hundred IP ranges from the SBL and elsewhere.  I have enough IP
> addresses that I do not need to NAT.
> 
> What are the relative merits of freebsd's ipf and ipfw?  It looks like
> either can do the filtering I need to do.  Any reason to choose one
> over the other?

For what it's worth, IPFW is also available on FreeBSD.

I don't know how different the BSDi version of IPFW was, but it may be
easier to use FreeBSD's IPFW -- at least at first.

If reducing the pain of a transition from BSD/OS to FreeBSD is a worthy
goal, I would recommend IPFW :)

> While I'm at it, should I turn on netgraph or just use the regular
> network stuff?

Not necessarily.  Do you really need it?