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Shorewall – The End of the Road

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51–60 of 70 posts

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#51
post #4

A project of this popularity and maturity essentially announcing they're shuttering because a single long-term contributor is retiring.. if ever there was a damning indictment of modern consumption-driven open source, I don't know what is

I feel like most open source projects are like that. https://github.com/antirez/redis/pulse/monthly https://github.com/django/django/pulse/monthly https://github.com/moby/moby/pulse/monthly

Was that supposed to be an irony or you didn't really check those links? All those projects have tons of commits and activity going on, by multiple people (35 in the case of Django!).

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#52
post #44

Yes this is a wrapper and it persisted iptables well. But for anyone that says shorewall is just a wrapper, probably just skimmed a manual and don’t understand the real genius here. what shorewall really did was make iptables feel like a polished usable firewall. iptables on its own is shit to work with. shorewall made it easy to use in so many cases. congrats on your retirement and thanks for a great tool that I use…

Not to shit on the author of shorewall, but i have to disagree: iptables is not shit to work on. Nor is iproute2. Or any of the low-level tools. They all have a place in the world.

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#53
I am very happy using shorewall. Thanks a lot Mr.Eastep for your time spending on this awesome software. we need to migrate the project to github or gitlab and maybe submitting the project in codeshelter.co to find collaborators.

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#54
post #24

Shorewall has been my goto firewall for years and still is. If any of you have ever followed my postfix howto [1] and others over the years, Shorewall has always been since 2005 the first thing to install and configure. It fits the balance I need between powerful and ease of use (to my limited skill level). UFW seems too simplistic, straight IP Tables to cumbersome. Either the community picks up the batton and I can…

One alternative which I really like (I prefer it actually to Shorewall) is https://firehol.org .

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#55
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just think about the networking changes that have happened in the last 50 years. This guy is insane to have lived through, and engineered against soo many changes in computer networking. I mean... If you are looking back at this guy's career, you need to realize, to this guy, Linux is a young whipper snapper of an OS. Megabit-speed networks werent even really a thing until this guy was like in his late forties or som…

It's just a wrapper around iptables...

C is just a wrapper around assembly.

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#56
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrapper or not, building a wrapper that works for as many use cases for as long a time as Shorewall has is something. Frankly, it sounds like your suggesting that because he didn't invent the underlying network stack, or network protocols, that makes it a quick and dirty half day or so project. 99.9% of development work in recent years hasn't been inventing new stuff, it's been building wrappers. Wrappers that compos…

All software is built on abstractions. I’m sure IPTablss is a giant “wrapper” around the Linux OS networking stack. Nothing wrong with a wrapper of the underlying system has had the real world field testing, longetivity, and adoption that IPTablws has.

Exactly :)

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#57
I've used Shorewall for years. Even after being confident enough in iptables to do it myself I have continued to use it to save time and because it just works the way I intend it to. I deeply appreciate his work and I hope he enjoys his retirement.

On that note...

"I am now departing on an extended trip to visit some of the places in the world that I have always dreamed of seeing."

People, don't wait until you are retiring to do this. Make the time now. If you think you cant, re-evaluate that thinking. I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places around the world. Some through work, others because they were places we wanted to go. I carry the experience and memories of these adventures with me and they are precious beyond measure. It makes me sad to think that some people wait until their lives are behind them to have these valuable experiences. Plan that trip now, for next month, next year, it doesn't matter. You will be happy you did for the rest of your life.

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#58
post #52
post #44

Yes this is a wrapper and it persisted iptables well. But for anyone that says shorewall is just a wrapper, probably just skimmed a manual and don’t understand the real genius here. what shorewall really did was make iptables feel like a polished usable firewall. iptables on its own is shit to work with. shorewall made it easy to use in so many cases. congrats on your retirement and thanks for a great tool that I use…

Not to shit on the author of shorewall, but i have to disagree: iptables is not shit to work on. Nor is iproute2. Or any of the low-level tools. They all have a place in the world.

Shorewall is probably nice tool but I have to agree. iptables (and netfilter thereof) are good to work with. In larger setups we used fwbuilder for generating the policy but it always boils down to understand iptables & netfilter.

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#59
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like most open source projects are like that. https://github.com/antirez/redis/pulse/monthly https://github.com/django/django/pulse/monthly https://github.com/moby/moby/pulse/monthly

Was that supposed to be an irony or you didn't really check those links? All those projects have tons of commits and activity going on, by multiple people (35 in the case of Django!).

Redis page is a good example, the other 2 not so much..

Check the "Contributors" page -- Redis has probably 95% of commits/code-volume from 2009 to 2019 by antirez himself. Yes there are other contributors but they make up a minority share.

https://github.com/antirez/redis/graphs/contributors

Re: Shorewall – The End of the Road

#60
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just think about the networking changes that have happened in the last 50 years. This guy is insane to have lived through, and engineered against soo many changes in computer networking. I mean... If you are looking back at this guy's career, you need to realize, to this guy, Linux is a young whipper snapper of an OS. Megabit-speed networks werent even really a thing until this guy was like in his late forties or som…

It's just a wrapper around iptables...

And a computer is just a thing that allows assholes to broadcast their opinions.
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