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New PF on FreeBSD snapshot available
Dan writes "Pyun YongHyeon and Max Laier announce a new release of PF for FreeBSD, which is available for download. Since the first release of PF at the end of March 2003, PF has undergone several major updates such as -current and ALTQ support. They have also removed bugs in IPv6, module handling and table support code and believe the current version 0.61 is very close to production use."
Actually, this is nothing like in Linux. In Linux-land, each new kernel brought out a brand-new, almost compeltely incompatible packet filter. ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables. The syntax changed. The features changed. There was no way to use the old filter. There were wrapper scripts to try and simulate this, but they are crud. Heck, the packet filters themselves are crud.
In FreeBSD, there's IPFW *or* IPFilter *or* Packet Filter. IPFW has been around a long time, and the syntax has changed very little. New features have been added, though, but all the old features still work. Same with IPF. Nobody is forced to switch from IPFW to IPF or PF. They can continue to use IPFW.
It's much nicer to be able to continue to use the same packet filter across minor *and* major versions of an OS. It's also nice to have a choice of two or three packet filters.
I'll definitely stick to BSD for packet filtering. Linux is nothing more than a toy.