Firewall Options

[Mark Felder]

On Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:12:18 -0600, Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Are there plans to update ipfilter or pf to current versions?
> ipfilter is currently at 5.1.2, but the version in FreeBSD is 4.1.28
> from 2007.
>
> On the pf side, the version in FreeBSD is 4.5, but the current version
> I would understand to be 5.2.  The version in FreeBSD is pre-4.7, so
> much of the syntax in the current documentation is different and does
> not work in this older version.
>
> Is IPFW the only maintained firewall option, or is there a way to
> build either of the above as ports?
>

It takes a *lot* of work to re-port packet filters to a different BSD  
kernel and ensure everything works perfectly. We recently received a nice  
pf version bump with the release of 9.0 and it doesn't seem likely we'll  
see another soon. There is an SMP-friendly fork of pf in progress for  
FreeBSD. It may very well turn out that FreeBSD's pf completely diverges  
 from OpenBSD's permanently as OpenBSD has no interest in an SMP-friendly  
pf.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/2012-June/006643.html

As for IPFW -- I honestly don't know. I can't remember the last time there  
was a major update of IPFW for FreeBSD.