Quotes from Shorewall Users

"I have fought with IPtables for untold hours. First I tried the SuSE firewall, which worked for 80% of what I needed. Then gShield, which also worked for 80%. Then I set out to write my own IPtables parser in shell and awk, which was a lot of fun but never got me past the "hey, cool" stage. Then I discovered Shorewall. After about an hour, everything just worked. I am stunned, and very grateful" -- ES, Phoenix AZ, USA.

"The configuration is intuitive and flexible, and much easier than any of the other iptables-based firewall programs out there. After sifting through many other scripts, it is obvious that yours is the most well thought-out and complete one available." -- BC, USA

"I just installed Shorewall after weeks of messing with ipchains/iptables and I had it up and running in under 20 minutes!" -- JL, Ohio

"My case was almost like [the one above]. Well. instead of 'weeks' it was 'months' for me, and I think I needed two minutes more:

One to see that I had no Internet access from the firewall itself.
Other to see that this was the default configuration, and it was enough to uncomment a line in /etc/shorewall/policy.

Minutes instead of months! Congratulations and thanks for such a simple and well documented thing for something as huge as iptables." -- JV, Spain.

"I downloaded Shorewall 1.2.0 and installed it on Mandrake 8.1 without any problems. Your documentation is great and I really appreciate your network configuration info. That really helped me out alot. THANKS!!!" -- MM.

"[Shorewall is a] great, great project. I've used/tested may firewall scripts but this one is till now the best." -- B.R, Netherlands

"Never in my +12 year career as a sys admin have I witnessed someone so relentless in developing a secure, state of the art, safe and useful product as the Shorewall firewall package for no cost or obligation involved." -- Mario Kerecki, Toronto

"one time more to report, that your great shorewall in the latest release 1.2.9 is working fine for me with SuSE Linux 7.3! I now have 7 machines up and running with shorewall on several versions - starting with 1.2.2 up to the new 1.2.9 and I never have encountered any problems!" -- SM, Germany

"You have the best support of any other package I've ever used." -- SE, US

"Because our company has information which has been classified by the national government as secret, our security doesn't stop by putting a fence around our company. Information security is a hot issue. We also make use of checkpoint firewalls, but not all of the internet servers are guarded by checkpoint, some of them are running....Shorewall." -- Name withheld by request, Europe

"thanx for all your efforts you put into shorewall - this product stands out against a lot of commercial stuff i´ve been working with in terms of flexibillity, quality & support" -- RM, Austria

"I have never seen such a complete firewall package that is so easy to configure. I searched the Debian package system for firewall scripts and Shorewall won hands down." -- RG, Toronto

"My respects... I've just found and installed Shorewall 1.3.3-1 and it is a wonderful piece of software. I've just sent out an email to about 30 people recommending it. :-)
While I had previously taken the time (maybe 40 hours) to really understand ipchains, then spent at least an hour per server customizing and carefully scrutinizing firewall rules, I've got shorewall running on my home firewall, with rulesets and policies that I know make sense, in under 20 minutes." -- RP, Guatamala

Updated 7/1/2003 - Tom Eastep