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NAME

       filter  backends  -  output  drivers  for  the  filtergen packet filter
       compiler

INTRODUCTION

       This document describes the status and  feature-set  of  the  currently
       available filtergen backends.

IPTABLES

       Most  development  is  done  first  against  the  iptables  driver.  It
       supports reject,  masquerading,  transparent  proxying,  logging  (with
       text)  and sub-groups, all of which should work fine (though the latter
       has only recently been fixed).

IPCHAINS

       The ipchains driver supports all of the above features, too.  Its state
       model  is much weaker though, of course.  The forwarding support should
       work OK, though it is not possible to support "local"-only packets.

IPFILTER

       The ipfilter backend is incomplete.  It supports accept,  drop,  reject
       and logging, but not masq, transproxy or sub-groups.  It should be easy
       for someone with knowledge of ipfilter to add  support  for  the  other
       features.   Options for OpenBSD "pf" features and syntax would be nice,
       too.  It has received no testing; I don’t even know  if  the  generated
       filters are syntactically correct.

CISCO

       The  cisco  driver is in roughly the same sort of state as the ipfilter
       one.  Additionally, because of the limitations of IOS ACLs, it supports
       only   a  limited  set  of  features.   It  cannot  support  reject  or
       transparent proxying, and may  not  be  able  to  support  masquerading
       either.   An option for reflexive (stateful) ACLs would be very useful.

       I understand that Cisco PIX firewalls use a variant of this  syntax  --
       it would be very nice to support them too.

SEE ALSO

       filtergen(8), filter_syntax(5)

                                January 7, 2004