shorewall_code/Shorewall-common/releasenotes.txt

Shorewall 3.9.1
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                   R E L E A S E  H I G H L I G H T S
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1) This is the first Shorewall release that fully integrates the new
   Shorewall-perl compiler. See the "New Features" section below.

2) You are now offered a choice as to which compiler(s) you install. In
   3.9.1, there are the following packages:

   - Shorewall ( common files )
   - Shorewall-shell ( the shell-based compiler )
   - Shorewall-perl (the Perl-based compiler )

You must install Shorewall and at least one of the compiler packages
(you may install them both).

Problems corrected in Shorewall 3.9.1

Migration Considerations:

1)  You cannot simply upgrade your existing Shorewall package. You must
    upgrade Shorewall *and* install one or both of the compilers.

    If you attempt to upgrade using the RPM, you get this result:

    gateway:~ # rpm -Uvh shorewall-3.9.1-1.noarch.rpm 
    error: Failed dependencies:
        shorewall_compiler is needed by shorewall-3.9.1-1.noarch
    gateway:~ #

    You must either:

	rpm -U shorewall-3.9.1.noarch.rpm shorewall-shell-3.9.1.noarch.rpm

    or

	rpm -U shorewall-3.9.1.noarch.rpm shorewall-perl-3.9.1.noarch.rpm
	
    or
	rpm -i shorewall-shell-3.9.1.noarch.rpm
	rpm -U shorewall-3.9.1.noarch.rpm

    or
	rpm -i shorewall-perl-3.9.1.noarch.rpm
	rpm -U shorewall-3.9.1.noarch.rpm

    If you are upgrading using the tarball, you must install either
    shorewall-shell or shorewall-perl before you upgrade
    Shorewall. Otherwise, the install.sh script fails with:

         ERROR: No Shorewall compiler is installed

    The shorewall-shell and shorewall-perl packages are installed from
    the tarball in the expected way; untar the package, and run the
    install.sh script.

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                         N E W  F E A T U R E S
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                          Shorewall-perl 3.9.1
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This companion product to Shorewall 3.4.2 and later includes a complete
rewrite of the compiler in Perl.

I decided to make Shorewall-perl a separate product for several reasons:

a) Embedded applications are unlikely to adopt Shorewall-perl; even Mini-Perl
has a substantial disk and Ram footprint.

b) Because of the gross incompatibilities between the new compiler and the
old (see below), migration to the new compiler must be voluntary.

c) By allowing Shorewall-perl to co-exist with the current Shorewall stable
release (3.4), I'm hoping that the new compiler will get more testing and
validation than it would if I were to package it with a new development
version of Shorewall itself.

d) Along the same vein, I think that users will be more likely to experiment
with the new compiler if they can easily fall back to the old one if things
get sticky.
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                  T H E   G O O D   N E W S:
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a) The compiler has a small disk footprint.
b) The compiler is very fast.
c) The compiler generates a firewall script that uses iptables-restore;
   so the script is very fast.
d) Use of the perl compiler is optional! The old slow clunky
   Bourne-shell compiler is still available.
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		  T H E   B A D   N E W S:
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There are a number of incompatibilities between the Perl-based compiler
and the Bourne-shell one. Some of these will probably go away by first
official release but most will not.

a) The Perl-based compiler requires the following capabilities in your
   kernel and iptables.

   - addrtype match (may be relaxed later)
   - multiport match (will not be relaxed)

   These capabilities are in current distributions.

b) Now that Netfilter has features to deal reasonably with port lists,
   I see no reason to duplicate those features in Shorewall. The
   Bourne-shell compiler goes to great pain (in some cases) to
   break very long port lists ( > 15 where port ranges in lists count
   as two ports) into individual rules. In the new compiler, I'm
   avoiding the ugliness required to do that. The new compiler just
   generates an error if your list is too long. It will also produce
   an error if you insert a port range into a port list and you don't
   have extended multiport support.

c) BRIDGING=Yes is not supported. The kernel code necessary to
   support this option was removed in Linux kernel 2.6.20.

d) The BROADCAST column in the interfaces file is essentially unused;
   if you enter anything in this column but '-' or 'detect', you will
   receive a warning. This will be relaxed if and when the addrtype
   match requirement is relaxed.

e) Because the compiler is now written in Perl, your compile-time
   extension scripts from earlier versions will no longer work.
   Compile-time extension scripts are executed using the Perl
   'eval `cat <file>`' mechanism. Be sure that each script returns a
   'true' value; otherwise, the compiler will assume that the script
   failed and will abort the compilation.

   When a script is invoked, the $chainref scalar variable will hold a
   reference to a chain table entry. 

       $chainref->{name}  contains the name of the chain
       $chainref->{table} holds the table name
       
       To add a rule to the chain:

	  add_rule $chainref, <the rule>

       Where

          <the rule> is a scalar argument holding the rule text. Do not
          include "-A <chain name>"

       Example:

          add_rule $chainref, '-j ACCEPT';

       To insert a rule into the chain:

          insert_rule $chainref, <rulenum>, <the rule>

       The log_rule_limit function works like it does in the shell
       compiler with two exceptions:

          - You pass the chain reference rather than the name of the
            chain.
	  - The commands are 'add' and 'insert' rather than '-A' and
            '-I'.
	  - There is only a single "pass as-is to iptables" argument
            (so you must quote that part).

       Example:

	  log_rule_limit
	      'info' , 
	      $chainref , 
	      $chainref->{name},
	      'DROP' , 
	      '',    #Limit
	      '' ,   #Log tag
	      'add';	      

f) The 'refresh' command is now synonymous with 'restart'.

g) Some run-time scripts will need to be changed to write their
   iptables commands to file descriptor 3 in iptables-restore format
   rather than running those commands.

	maclog

   Details to follow.

   Some run-time scripts are simply eliminated because they no longer
   make any sense under Shorewall-perl:

	initdone  - The these two scripts assumed a model where the
	continue    chains were built in parallel. In the
		    iptables-restore model, chains are built serially
		    within tables and tables are build serially.  

	refresh   - The 'refresh' command is the same as 'restart'
	refreshed

h) The /etc/shorewall/tos file now has zone-independent SOURCE and DEST
   columns as do all other files except the rules and policy files.

   The SOURCE column may be one of the following:

       [all:]<address>[,...]
       [all:]<interface>[:<address>[,...]]
       $FW[:<address>[,...]]

   The DEST column may be one of the following:
       [all:]<address>[,...]
       [all:]<interface>[:<address>[,...]]

   This is a permanent change. The old zone-based rules have never
   worked right and this is a good time to replace them. I've tried to
   make the new syntax cover the most common cases without requiring
   change to existing files. In particular, it will handle the tos file
   released with Shorewall 1.4 and earlier.

i) Currently, support for ipsets is untested. That will change with
   future pre-releases but one thing is certain -- Shorewall is now out
   of the ipset load/reload business. With scripts generated by the
   Perl-based Compiler, the Netfilter ruleset is never cleared. That
   means that there is no opportunity for Shorewall to load/reload your
   ipsets since that cannot be done while there are any current rules
   using ipsets.

   So:
	i)   Your ipsets must be loaded before Shorewall starts. You
	     are free to try to do that with the following code in
	     /etc/shorewall/start:

	     if [ "$COMMAND" = start ]; then
		ipset -U :all: :all:
		ipset -F
		ipset -X
		ipset -R < /my/ipset/contents
	     fi

	     The file '/my/ipset/contents' (not its real name of
	     course) will normally be produced using the ipset -S
	     command.

	     The above will work most of the time but will fail in a
	     'shorewall stop' - 'shorewall start' sequence if you
	     use ipsets in your routestopped file (see below).

	ii)  Your ipsets may not be reloaded until Shorewall is stopped or
	     cleared.

	iii) If you specify ipsets in your routestopped file then
	     Shorewall must be cleared in order to reload your ipsets.

   As a consequence, scripts generated by the Perl-based compiler will
   ignore /etc/shorewall/ipsets and will issue a warning if you set
   SAVE_IPSETS=Yes in shorewall.conf.

j) Because the configuration files (with the exception of
   /etc/shorewall/params) are now processed by the Perl-based compiler
   rather than by the shell, only the basic forms of Shell expansion
   ($variable and ${variable}) are supported. The more exotic forms
   such as ${variable:=default} are not supported. Both variables
   defined in /etc/shorewall/params and environmental variables
   (exported by the shell) can be used in configuration files.

h) USE_ACTIONS=No is not supported. That option is intended to minimize
   Shorewall's footprint in embedded applications. As a consequence,
   Default Macros are not supported.

i) DELAYBLACKLISTLOAD=Yes is not supported. The entire ruleset is
   atomically loaded with one execution of iptables-restore.

j) MAPOLDACTIONS=Yes is not supported. People should have converted to
   using macros by now.

k) The pre Shorewall-3.0 format of the zones file is not supported;
   neither is the /etc/shorewall/ipsec file.
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                      P R E R E Q U I S I T E S
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- Perl (I use Perl 5.8.8 but other versions should work fine)
- Perl Cwd Module
- Perl File::Basename Module
- Perl File::Temp Module
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               U S I N G   T H E   N E W   C O M P I L E R
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If you only install one compiler, then that compiler will be used.

If you install both compilers, then the compiler actually used depends
on the SHOREWALL_COMPILER setting in shorewall.conf.

The value of this new option can be either 'perl' or 'shell'.

If you add 'SHOREWALL_COMPILER=shell' to /etc/shorewall/shorewall.conf
then by default, the new compiler will be used on the system. If you
add it to shorewall.conf in a separate directory (such as a
Shorewall-lite export directory) then the new compiler will only be
used when you compile from that directory.

If you only install one compiler, it is suggested that you do not set
SHOREWALL_COMPILER.

Regardless of the setting of SHOREWALL_COMPILER, there is one change in
Shorewall operation that is triggered simply by installing
shorewall-perl. Your params file will be processed during compilation 
with the shell's '-a' option  which causes any variables that you set
or create in that file to be automatically exported. Since the params
file is processed before shorewall.conf, using -a insures that the
settings of your params variables are available to the new compiler
should it's use be specified in shorewall.conf.