[ILUG] controversial firewall question

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to Enda's flatulent wordings, 
> Depends on the features your looking for, each offer somthing new, eg
> if you want a solid NAT, then iptables, no NAT, then I'd use sinus for
> its configurator and robustness.

I think IPF, IPFW, Iptables and PF are the cream of the crop of open
source firewalls ATM.  I haven't tried PF but since it's a replacement
for IPF I imagine that everything but stability, maturity and efficiency
would be quite similar

In order of preference

If you're talking general firewalling (including stateful firewalling)
IPF (stable, efficient, good ruleset configuration)

No real difference between iptables and ipfw

If you're talking NAT

IPF (very mature and stable)
Iptables (decent but not as stable and prone to cock up for things such
as changing IPs)
IPFW (inefficiently uses userspace daemon for kernel -> user space ->
kernel copies of NATed packets, many many times slower than above two)

If you're talking fancy features

Iptables and IPFW, both can be used to do traffic shaping, filtering by
UID/GID and so on

IPF has a plugin system to do so but ATM I haven't seen many plugins to
do such things