[Wolves] Roll your own firewall advice

[Stuart Langridge]

Adam Sweet wrote:
> Easy now party people ;)
> 
> I have to write the firewall and NAT for my project. I
> also have to write a web admin front end for it to
> allow the for the adding and removing of rules such as
> port blocking, unblocking and forwarding etc.
> 
> My base system is Debian testing. How should I best go
> about this? Is there a nice package that I could use
> or am I best writing it myself in IP Tables and then
> writing a front end to add and remove rules?

There is more than one graphical firewall builder around, which you migt 
want to take a look at. I can't think of anything which is above the 
level of iptables which you could then use to build your own configurer, 
so that means writing a front end to iptables (as said, you are not the 
first person to think of this :))

Personally, I think it'd be really cool to have a graphical front end 
that real people can understand, that doesn't require you to understand 
what ports are or what UDP is or anything. Not sure if it's possible.

Aq.

PS: why are they making you write a firewall??? Isn't that like teaching 
people long division in a world where they should just bloody use a 
calculator?