Table of Contents
6wall is for IPv6 what Shorewall is for IPv4
Never heard of Shorewall? Then I suggest that you first get acquainted with this excellent iptables based firewall for IPv4 at www.shorewall.net. 6wall is heavily based on Shorewall 1.4, in fact most of the work on 6wall has been to convert the functionalities for IPv4 in Shorewall to their IPv6 equivalent.
6wall is a Netfilter (ip6tables) based firewall that can be used on a dedicated firewall system, a multi-function gateway/router/server or on a standalone GNU/Linux system.
Although 6wall is Linux distribution independant, currently only a ready to use package for Linux Embedded Appliance Firewalls (LEAF) is available. It is currently distributed as part of the Bering-uClibc branch of LEAF.
6wall is based on ip6tables, which currently doesn't support as many features as iptables. Therefore a number of options/features of Shorewall could not be converted to their IPv6 counterpart in 6wall. Below is an overview of the main limitations of 6wall/ip6tables compared to Shorewall/iptables:
No support for connection tracking
Allowed policies are ACCEPT, DROP, CONTINUE and NONE
Allowed actions for rules are ACCEPT, DROP, CONTINUE and LOG
Policies and actions REJECT, REDIRECT are not supported
Log target ULOG is not supported
Network Address Translation (SNAT and DNAT) is not available
More detailed information on the available options/features can be found in the 6wall reference manual.
Comments on 6wall and the 6wall user guide should be addressed to
its maintainer: Eric de Thouars <dorus@users.sourceforge.net>.
I would like to thank Tom Eastep for his work on Shorewall. Without his very structured programming style it would never have been possible for me to produce 6wall.
A lot of the 6wall documentation has been taken from Tom's site and adapted to reflect the changes I made from Shorewall to 6wall. In most cases the documentation and examples for Shorewall can directly be applied to 6wall by just replacing the IPv4 addresses with IPv6 addresses. Therefore this user guide will mainly give a global overview of 6wall, refer to Shorewall for most documentation and examples, and focus explicitly on the areas where 6wall and Shorewall differ.
Please don't bother Tom with 6wall questions, only Shorewall related questions should be directed to him !!!
Current LEAF/LRP version: 1.0.1 - August 6, 2003
For changes since previous versions check the Changelog.