Tom Eastep 2004-09-06 2002 2003 2004 Thomas M. Eastep Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

Setting up a Linux system as a firewall for a small network is a fairly straight-forward task if you understand the basics and follow the documentation. This guide doesn't attempt to acquaint you with all of the features of Shorewall. It rather focuses on what is required to configure Shorewall in its most common configuration: Linux system used as a firewall/router for a small local network. Single public IP address. If you have more than one public IP address, this is not the guide you want -- see the Shorewall Setup Guide instead. Internet connection through cable modem, DSL, ISDN, Frame Relay, dial-up ... Here is a schematic of a typical installation:

If you are running Shorewall under Mandrake 9.0 or later, you can easily configure the above setup using the Mandrake Internet Connection Sharing applet. From the Mandrake Control Center, select Network & Internet then Connection Sharing. Note however, that the Shorewall configuration produced by Mandrake Internet Connection Sharing is strange and is apt to confuse you if you use the rest of this documentation (it has two local zones; loc and masq where loc is empty; this conflicts with this documentation which assumes a single local zone loc). We therefore recommend that once you have set up this sharing that you uninstall the Mandrake Shorewall RPM and install the one from the download page then follow the instructions in this Guide. The above Shorewall Issue is corrected in Mandrake 10.0 and later. If you edit your configuration files on a Windows system, you must save them as Unix files if your editor supports that option or you must run them through dos2unix before trying to use them. Similarly, if you copy a configuration file from your Windows hard drive to a floppy disk, you must run dos2unix against the copy before using it with Shorewall. Windows Version of dos2unix Linux Version of dos2unix

Shorewall requires that you have the iproute/iproute2 package installed (on RedHat, the package is called iproute). You can tell if this package is installed by the presence of an ip program on your firewall system. As root, you can use the which command to check for this program: [root@gateway root]# which ip /sbin/ip [root@gateway root]# I recommend that you first read through the guide to familiarize yourself with what's involved then go back through it again making your configuration changes.

Points at which configuration changes are recommended are flagged with . Configuration notes that are unique to LEAF/Bering are marked with .

If you have an ADSL Modem and you use PPTP to communicate with a server in that modem, you must make the changes recommended here in addition to those detailed below. ADSL with PPTP is most commonly found in Europe, notably in Austria.

The configuration files for Shorewall are contained in the directory /etc/shorewall -- for simple setups, you will only need to deal with a few of these as described in this guide. Note to Debian Users If you install using the .deb, you will find that your /etc/shorewall directory is empty. This is intentional. The released configuration file skeletons may be found on your system in the directory /usr/share/doc/shorewall/default-config. Simply copy the files you need from that directory to /etc/shorewall and modify the copies. Note that you must copy /usr/share/doc/shorewall/default-config/shorewall.conf and /usr/share/doc/shorewall/default-config/modules to /etc/shorewall even if you do not modify those files. After you have installed Shorewall, download the two-interface sample, un-tar it (tar -zxvf two-interfaces.tgz) and and copy the files to /etc/shorewall (these files will replace files with the same name). As each file is introduced, I suggest that you look through the actual file on your system -- each file contains detailed configuration instructions and default entries. Shorewall views the network where it is running as being composed of a set of zones. In the two-interface sample configuration, the following zone names are used: Name Description net The Internet loc Your Local Network Zones are defined in the /etc/shorewall/zones file. Shorewall also recognizes the firewall system as its own zone - by default, the firewall itself is known as fw. Rules about what traffic to allow and what traffic to deny are expressed in terms of zones. You express your default policy for connections from one zone to another zone in the /etc/shorewall/policy file. You define exceptions to those default policies in the /etc/shorewall/rules file. For each connection request entering the firewall, the request is first checked against the /etc/shorewall/rules file. If no rule in that file matches the connection request then the first policy in /etc/shorewall/policy that matches the request is applied. If there is a comon action defined for the policy in /etc/shorewall/actions or /usr/share/shorewall/actions.std then that action is peformed before the action is applied. The /etc/shorewall/policy file included with the two-interface sample has the following policies: #SOURCE DEST POLICY LOG LEVEL LIMIT:BURST loc net ACCEPT net all DROP info all all REJECT info In the two-interface sample, the line below is included but commented out. If you want your firewall system to have full access to servers on the internet, uncomment that line. #SOURCE DEST POLICY LOG LEVEL LIMIT:BURST fw net ACCEPT The above policy will: Allow all connection requests from your local network to the internet Drop (ignore) all connection requests from the internet to your firewall or local network Optionally accept all connection requests from the firewall to the internet (if you uncomment the additional policy) reject all other connection requests. At this point, edit your /etc/shorewall/policy and make any changes that you wish.

The firewall has two network interfaces. Where Internet connectivity is through a cable or DSL Modem, the External Interface will be the ethernet adapter that is connected to that Modem (e.g., eth0) unless you connect via Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) or Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) in which case the External Interface will be a ppp interface (e.g., ppp0). If you connect via a regular modem, your External Interface will also be ppp0. If you connect via ISDN, your external interface will be ippp0. If your external interface is ppp0 or ippp0 then you will want to set CLAMPMSS=yes in /etc/shorewall/shorewall.conf. Your Internal Interface will be an ethernet adapter (eth1 or eth0) and will be connected to a hub or switch. Your other computers will be connected to the same hub/switch (note: If you have only a single internal system, you can connect the firewall directly to the computer using a cross-over cable). Do not connect the internal and external interface to the same hub or switch except for testing AND you are running Shorewall version 1.4.7 or later. When using these recent versions, you can test using this kind of configuration if you specify the arp_filter option in /etc/shorewall/interfaces for all interfaces connected to the common hub/switch. Using such a setup with a production firewall is strongly recommended against. The Shorewall two-interface sample configuration assumes that the external interface is eth0 and the internal interface is eth1. If your configuration is different, you will have to modify the sample /etc/shorewall/interfaces file accordingly. While you are there, you may wish to review the list of options that are specified for the interfaces. Some hints: If your external interface is ppp0 or ippp0, you can replace the detect in the second column with a - (minus the quotes). If your external interface is ppp0 or ippp0 or if you have a static IP address, you can remove dhcp from the option list. If your internal interface is a bridge create using the brctl utility then you must add the routeback option to the option list. If you specify norfc1918 for your external interface, you will want to check the Shorewall Errata periodically for updates to the /usr/share/shorewall/rfc1918 file. Alternatively, you can copy /usr/share/shorewall/rfc1918 to /etc/shorewall/rfc1918 then strip down your /etc/shorewall/rfc1918 file as I do.

Before going further, we should say a few words about Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Normally, your ISP will assign you a single Public IP address. This address may be assigned via the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) or as part of establishing your connection when you dial in (standard modem) or establish your PPP connection. In rare cases, your ISP may assign you a static IP address; that means that you configure your firewall's external interface to use that address permanently. However your external address is assigned, it will be shared by all of your systems when you access the Internet. You will have to assign your own addresses in your internal network (the Internal Interface on your firewall plus your other computers). RFC 1918 reserves several Private IP address ranges for this purpose: 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 Before starting Shorewall, you should look at the IP address of your external interface and if it is one of the above ranges, you should remove the 'norfc1918' option from the external interface's entry in /etc/shorewall/interfaces. You will want to assign your addresses from the same sub-network (subnet). For our purposes, we can consider a subnet to consists of a range of addresses x.y.z.0 - x.y.z.255. Such a subnet will have a Subnet Mask of 255.255.255.0. The address x.y.z.0 is reserved as the Subnet Address and x.y.z.255 is reserved as the Subnet Broadcast Address. In Shorewall, a subnet is described using Classless InterDomain Routing (CIDR) notation with consists of the subnet address followed by /24. The 24 refers to the number of consecutive leading 1 bits from the left of the subnet mask. Range: 10.10.10.0 - 10.10.10.255 Subnet Address: 10.10.10.0 Broadcast Address: 10.10.10.255 CIDR Notation: 10.10.10.0/24 It is conventional to assign the internal interface either the first usable address in the subnet (10.10.10.1 in the above example) or the last usable address (10.10.10.254). One of the purposes of subnetting is to allow all computers in the subnet to understand which other computers can be communicated with directly. To communicate with systems outside of the subnetwork, systems send packets through a gateway (router). Your local computers (computer 1 and computer 2 in the above diagram) should be configured with their default gateway to be the IP address of the firewall's internal interface. The foregoing short discussion barely scratches the surface regarding subnetting and routing. If you are interested in learning more about IP addressing and routing, I highly recommend IP Fundamentals: What Everyone Needs to Know about Addressing & Routing, Thomas A. Maufer, Prentice-Hall, 1999, ISBN 0-13-975483-0 (link). The remainder of this quide will assume that you have configured your network as shown here: The default gateway for computer's 1 & 2 would be 10.10.10.254. Your ISP might assign your external interface an RFC 1918 address. If that address is in the 10.10.10.0/24 subnet then you will need to select a DIFFERENT RFC 1918 subnet for your local network.

The addresses reserved by RFC 1918 are sometimes referred to as non-routable because the Internet backbone routers don't forward packets which have an RFC-1918 destination address. When one of your local systems (let's assume computer 1) sends a connection request to an internet host, the firewall must perform Network Address Translation (NAT). The firewall rewrites the source address in the packet to be the address of the firewall's external interface; in other words, the firewall makes it look as if the firewall itself is initiating the connection. This is necessary so that the destination host will be able to route return packets back to the firewall (remember that packets whose destination address is reserved by RFC 1918 can't be routed across the internet so the remote host can't address its response to computer 1). When the firewall receives a return packet, it rewrites the destination address back to 10.10.10.1 and forwards the packet on to computer 1. On Linux systems, the above process is often referred to as IP Masquerading but you will also see the term Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) used. Shorewall follows the convention used with Netfilter: Masquerade describes the case where you let your firewall system automatically detect the external interface address. SNAT refers to the case when you explicitly specify the source address that you want outbound packets from your local network to use. In Shorewall, both Masquerading and SNAT are configured with entries in the /etc/shorewall/masq file. You will normally use Masquerading if your external IP is dynamic and SNAT if the IP is static. If your external firewall interface is eth0, you do not need to modify the file provided with the sample. Otherwise, edit /etc/shorewall/masq and change the first column to the name of your external interface and the second column to the name of your internal interface. If your external IP is static, you can enter it in the third column in the /etc/shorewall/masq entry if you like although your firewall will work fine if you leave that column empty. Entering your static IP in column 3 makes processing outgoing packets a little more efficient. If you are using the Debian package, please check your shorewall.conf file to ensure that the following are set correctly; if they are not, change them appropriately: NAT_ENABLED=Yes (Shorewall versions earlier than 1.4.6) IP_FORWARDING=On

One of your goals may be to run one or more servers on your local computers. Because these computers have RFC-1918 addresses, it is not possible for clients on the internet to connect directly to them. It is rather necessary for those clients to address their connection requests to the firewall who rewrites the destination address to the address of your server and forwards the packet to that server. When your server responds, the firewall automatically performs SNAT to rewrite the source address in the response. The above process is called Port Forwarding or Destination Network Address Translation (DNAT). You configure port forwarding using DNAT rules in the /etc/shorewall/rules file. The general form of a simple port forwarding rule in /etc/shorewall/rules is: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) DNAT net loc:<server local ip address>[:<server port>] <protocol> <port> You run a Web Server on computer 2 and you want to forward incoming TCP port 80 to that system: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) DNAT net loc:10.10.10.2 tcp 80 You run an FTP Server on computer 1 so you want to forward incoming TCP port 21 to that system: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) DNAT net loc:10.10.10.1 tcp 21 For FTP, you will also need to have FTP connection tracking and NAT support in your kernel. For vendor-supplied kernels, this means that the ip_conntrack_ftp and ip_nat_ftp modules must be loaded. Shorewall will automatically load these modules if they are available and located in the standard place under /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter. A couple of important points to keep in mind: You must test the above rule from a client outside of your local network (i.e., don't test from a browser running on computers 1 or 2 or on the firewall). If you want to be able to access your web server and/or FTP server from inside your firewall using the IP address of your external interface, see Shorewall FAQ #2. Many ISPs block incoming connection requests to port 80. If you have problems connecting to your web server, try the following rule and try connecting to port 5000. #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) DNAT net loc:10.10.10.2:80 tcp 5000 At this point, modify /etc/shorewall/rules to add any DNAT rules that you require.

Normally, when you connect to your ISP, as part of getting an IP address your firewall's Domain Name Service (DNS) resolver will be automatically configured (e.g., the /etc/resolv.conf file will be written). Alternatively, your ISP may have given you the IP address of a pair of DNS name servers for you to manually configure as your primary and secondary name servers. Regardless of how DNS gets configured on your firewall, it is your responsibility to configure the resolver in your internal systems. You can take one of two approaches: You can configure your internal systems to use your ISP's name servers. If your ISP gave you the addresses of their servers or if those addresses are available on their web site, you can configure your internal systems to use those addresses. If that information isn't available, look in /etc/resolv.conf on your firewall system -- the name servers are given in "nameserver" records in that file. You can configure a Caching Name Server on your firewall. Red Hat has an RPM for a caching name server (the RPM also requires the bindRPM) and for Bering users, there is dnscache.lrp. If you take this approach, you configure your internal systems to use the firewall itself as their primary (and only) name server. You use the internal IP address of the firewall (10.10.10.254 in the example above) for the name server address. To allow your local systems to talk to your caching name server, you must open port 53 (both UDP and TCP) from the local network to the firewall; you do that by adding the following rules in /etc/shorewall/rules. #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) AllowDNS loc fw

The two-interface sample includes the following rules: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) AllowDNS fw netThis rule allows DNS access from your firewall and may be removed if you uncommented the line in /etc/shorewall/policy allowing all connections from the firewall to the internet. In the rule shown above, AllowDNS is an example of a defined action. Shorewall includes a number of defined actions and you can add your own. To see the list of actions included with your version of Shorewall, look in the file /usr/share/shorewall/actions.std. Those actions that accept connection requests have names that begin with Allow. You don't have to use defined actions when coding a rule in /etc/shorewall/rules; the generated Netfilter ruleset is slightly more efficient if you code your rules directly rather than using defined actions. The the rule shown above could also have been coded as follows:#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) ACCEPT fw net udp 53 ACCEPT fw net tcp 53 In cases where Shorewall doesn't include a defined action to meet your needs, you can either define the action yourself or you can simply code the appropriate rules directly. The sample also includes: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) AllowSSH loc fw That rule allows you to run an SSH server on your firewall and connect to that server from your local systems. If you wish to enable other connections from your firewall to other systems, the general format using an Allow action is: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) <action> fw <destination zone>The general format when not using defined actions is:#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) ACCEPT fw <destination zone> <protocol> <port> You want to run a Web Server on your firewall system: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) AllowWeb net fw AllowWeb loc fw Those two rules would of course be in addition to the rules listed above under You can configure a Caching Name Server on your firewall. If you don't know what port and protocol a particular application uses, look here. I don't recommend enabling telnet to/from the internet because it uses clear text (even for login!). If you want shell access to your firewall from the internet, use SSH: #ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) AllowSSH net fw Bering users will want to add the following two rules to be compatible with Jacques's Shorewall configuration.#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO DEST PORT(S) ACCEPT loc fw udp 53 #Allow DNS Cache to work ACCEPT loc fw tcp 80 #Allow Weblet to work Now edit your /etc/shorewall/rules file to add or delete other connections as required.

You cannot test your firewall from the inside. Just because you send requests to your firewall external IP address does not mean that the request will be associated with the external interface or the net zone. Any traffic that you generate from the local network will be associated with your local interface and will be treated as loc->fw traffic. IP addresses are properties of systems, not of interfaces. It is a mistake to believe that your firewall is able to forward packets just because you can ping the IP address of all of the firewall's interfaces from the local network. The only conclusion you can draw from such pinging success is that the link between the local system and the firewall works and that you probably have the local system's default gateway set correctly. All IP addresses configured on firewall interfaces are in the $FW (fw) zone. If 192.168.1.254 is the IP address of your internal interface then you can write $FW:192.168.1.254 in a rule but you may not write loc:192.168.1.254. Similarly, it is nonsensical to add 192.168.1.254 to the loc zone using an entry in /etc/shorewall/hosts. Reply packets do NOT automatically follow the reverse path of the one taken by the original request. All packets are routed according to the routing table of the host at each step of the way. This issue commonly comes up when people install a Shorewall firewall parallel to an existing gateway and try to use DNAT through Shorewall without changing the default gateway of the system receiving the forwarded requests. Requests come in through the Shorewall firewall where the destination IP address gets rewritten but replies go out unmodified through the old gateway. Shorewall itself has no notion of inside or outside. These concepts are embodied in how Shorewall is configured.

The installation procedure configures your system to start Shorewall at system boot but beginning with Shorewall version 1.3.9 startup is disabled so that your system won't try to start Shorewall before configuration is complete. Once you have completed configuration of your firewall, you can enable Shorewall startup by removing the file /etc/shorewall/startup_disabled. Users of the .deb package must edit /etc/default/shorewall and set startup=1. The firewall is started using the shorewall start command and stopped using shorewall stop. When the firewall is stopped, routing is enabled on those hosts that have an entry in /etc/shorewall/routestopped. A running firewall may be restarted using the shorewall restart command. If you want to totally remove any trace of Shorewall from your Netfilter configuration, use shorewall clear. The two-interface sample assumes that you want to enable routing to/from eth1 (the local network) when Shorewall is stopped. If your local network isn't connected to eth1 or if you wish to enable access to/from other hosts, change /etc/shorewall/routestopped accordingly. If you are connected to your firewall from the internet, do not issue a shorewall stop command unless you have added an entry for the IP address that you are connected from to /etc/shorewall/routestopped. Also, I don't recommend using shorewall restart; it is better to create an alternate configuration and test it using the shorewall try command.

I highly recommend that you review the Common Configuration File Features page -- it contains helpful tips about Shorewall features than make administering your firewall easier.

Once you have the two-interface setup working, the next logical step is to add a Wireless Network. The first step involves adding an additional network card to your firewall, either a Wireless card or an ethernet card that is connected to a Wireless Access Point. When you add a network card, it won't necessarily be detected as the next highest ethernet interface. For example, if you have two ethernet cards in your system (eth0 and eth1) and you add a third card that uses the same driver as one of the other two, that third card won't necessarily be detected as eth2; it could rather be detected as eth0 or eth1! You can either live with that or you can shuffle the cards around in the slots until the new card is detected as eth2. Your new network will look similar to what is shown in the following figure. The first thing to note is that the computers in your wireless network will be in a different subnet from those on your wired local LAN. In the above example, we have chosen to use the network 10.10.11.0/24. Computers 3 and 4 would be configured with a default gateway IP address of 10.10.11.254. Second, we have chosen to include the wireless network as part of the local zone. Since Shorewall allows intra-zone traffic by default, traffic may flow freely between the local wired network and the wireless network. There are only two changes that need to be made to the Shorewall configuration: An entry needs to be added to /etc/shorewall/interfaces for the wireless network interface. If the wireless interface is wlan0, the entry might look like: #ZONE INTERFACE BROADCAST OPTIONS loc wlan0 detect maclist As shown in the above entry, I recommend using the maclist option for the wireless segment. By adding entries for computers 3 and 4 in /etc/shorewall/maclist, you help ensure that your neighbors aren't getting a free ride on your internet connection. Start by omitting that option; when you have everything working, then add the option and configure your /etc/shorewall/maclist file. You need to add an entry to the /etc/shorewall/masq file to masquerade traffic from the wireless network to the internet. If your internet interface is eth0 and your wireless interface is wlan0, the entry would be: #INTERFACE SUBNET ADDRESS eth0 wlan0 One other thing to note. To get Microsoft networking working between the wireless and wired networks, you will need either a WINS server or a PDC. I personally use Samba configured as a WINS server running on my firewall. Running a WINS server on your firewall requires the rules listed in the Shorewall/Samba documentation.