EtherDam 0.4 review

EtherDam is a firewall configuration engine that relies on iptables

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Kelledin

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EtherDam is a firewall configuration engine that relies on iptables. It presents firewall configuration as a somewhat simpler scripting language that's still flexible enough for most purposes.

So why not just use iptables?

Well, let's just face one thing: iptables is a pain to manage. By 'pain,' I mean a heavy dull throb that seems ready to make your head explode. It's nice to finally have a stateful firewalling facility for Linux, but you have to remember fifteen or so different arrangements of the iptables options just to make a simple bare-metal NAT box. It's enough to send you running back to OpenBSD.

One day, I got tired of that. So I came up with EtherDam.

My goal with EtherDam was to create a simplified firewall configuration language rather than remember or look up several complex incantations of the iptables command. EtherDam is a wrapper; it still uses iptables as a back-end. The processing engine is also fast, though it's not extremely well tested.

The language itself is fairly complete--complete enough for a decent firewall--though it's not properly documented yet.

What's New in This Release:
etherdam.in:
added IPTABLES command support.
added MSS command for TCP MSS clamping.
firewall.conf.5.in: documented MSS command, fixed typos.
firewall.conf.in: added example MSS command usage.
configure, configure.ac, etherdam.spec: bumped version number.
new release (release 0.4)