Firewall Builder / News: Recent posts

I regret to report that I am leaving NetCitadel today. I have started Firewall Builder project in 2000 and it has been great to work with all of you for all these years. I really appreciate all the feedback and support you have provided and hope I have built something useful that helped you do your day to day work.

Please do not hesitate to send your fwbuilder questions to my personal email vadim@happygears.org and I'll try to answer as my time permits.... read more

After working on Firewall Builder for many years it is with some sadness that Vadim and I are announcing that we have suspended all development activity for this project. Firewall Builder has been a great project to work on and we have truly appreciated all the support and positive feedback that the user community has provided. Without you we wouldn’t have been able to keep things going this long.... read more

Packages for Windows and Mac OS X are now distributed under the GPL, and the source code includes all files necessary to build on Linux, *BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. This release also includes a few bugfixes in the policy compiler for iptables and for the build problem on Gentoo

We are happy to announce release of the new version of Firewall Builder, v5.0.1. This is a big-fix release, here are some most important fixes :

- improvement in the design of the installer dialog; checkbox that controls "batch install" moved to the dialog where user enters passwords. Now user can start in a non-batch install mode but continue in batch install mode later.

- fixed several GUI crashes... read more

Firewall Builder 5 is a major new release that includes multiple GUI enhancements as well as the following new features:

* User defined subfolders
* Object keyword tags
* Dynamic groups with smart filters
* Multiple operations per filter rule
* New Attached Networks object
* Import of PF configuration files
* and more...

More information for this release, including a list of bug fixes, can be found in the release notes:
http://www.fwbuilder.org/4.0/docs/firewall_builder_release_notes.html#5.0.0... read more

v4.2.1 is a bug-fix release to fix defects discovered in the built-in policy installer batch mode, SNMP network discovery wizard and few minor problems in the GUI.

Firewall Builder V4.2 is now officially released. With many improvements for importing existing firewall configurations it's now even easier for users to get started with Firewall Builder. V4.2 introduces support for importing Cisco ASA/PIX/FWSM configurations as well as adding de-duplication of imported objects.

This release also includes significant improvements for supporting advanced system configurations for BSD platforms. Now users can configure bridge interfaces, static routes and more. And for FreeBSD platforms users have the option for generating configurations in rc.conf style formats.... read more

Firewall Builder V4.1.3 is now available! This release includes a number of usability improvements and bug fixes. Usability improvements include the addition of an Advanced User mode which reduces the number of tooltips for power users and the addition of a new policy rule checkbox to define whether new rules have logging enabled or disabled by default. Critical bug fixes include improved support for Windows systems that use Putty sessions, support for configuring IP broadcast addresses on interfaces and several fixes relating to cluster configurations. Cluster configuration fixes include adding support for importing branching rules when a cluster is created and support for generating NAT rules that require iptables REDIRECT target.... read more

We are happy to announce that we released Firewall Builder V4.1.2 this morning. This release includes a few bug fixes and many usability enhancements. After conducting several usability tests with new users we realized that some concepts and areas of the application can be challenging for new users who are trying to get started. To help new users we have added more visual cues and navigation aids in the GUI. We also simplified the entry fields in several wizards to help make it easier to create certain types of new objects.... read more

We are happy to announce the release of V4.1.1. This release includes fixes for a number of minor bugs as well being the first release to officially support HP ProCurve ACL configuration. Thanks to a generous donation of several switches from HP we were able to test and finalize the ProCurve support. This release also fixes a critical bug in V4.1 related to Cisco IOS ACL configurations. Some configurations would cause Firewall Builder to incorrectly generate and error with the message "Can not find interface with network zone that includes address A.B.C.D.".... read more

We are happy to announce that V4.1 in now released! You can download it from our website here:

http://www.fwbuilder.org/4.0/docs/firewall_builder_packages.html

V4.1 includes new enhancements and features including:

- Support for Address Table objects that use the iptables ipset module

- Integrated SSH tools (plink.exe and pscp.exe) in Windows installer package

- New toolbar shortcut to view complete generated firewall configuration files in the GUI... read more

This release fixes security issue with temporary file handling in the generated iptables script that affects only Linux systems where Firewall Builder is used to generate static routing configuration. It also significantly improves performance of batch compile operation and fixes few other minor problems. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

This is a bug-fix release, it comes with improvements in the GUI to fix problems with printing of large rule sets and additional optimization in the generated iptables and PF configurations.

This is a bug-fix release that improves program stability. This release is recommended for production use, everybody is encouraged to upgrade. We now offer deb and rpm repositories, the "stable" repositories now host packages v3.0.5-b1076. <a href="http://www.fwbuilder.org/docs/firewall_builder_packages.html"> This page</a> explains how to set up apt and yum to use our repositories.

This version includes numerous bug fixes, as well as improvements in the built-in policy installer, SNMP discovery, support for IPv6 for all platforms, policy compilers for iptables and PF. Generation of static routing commands for Cisco IOS and PIX has been implemented.

This is a bug-fix release. Problems with storing IPv6 addresses on FreeBSD have been fixed. GUI stability on operations of copying multiple objects between different data files has been improved. Parser for Cisco IOS configurations can now import configurations with wider range of constructs. Support for non-ASCII characters in the RCS commit comments has been implemented.

Notable new features in this release: built-in installer uses scp (pscp.exe on Windows) to copy files to the firewall, this makes it work much faster; optional data file compression; support for pure mangle table rule sets for iptables; significant improvement in the speed of the shadowing detection for all compilers (up to 5 times on large linear policies); numerous bug fixes and improvements in the GUI and policy compilers.

This is first minor release in the v3.0 series. This release includes numerous usability improvements and stability fixes. See Release Notes at http://www.fwbuilder.org/docs/firewall_builder_release_notes.html#3.0.1

These rpms are statically linked with QT 4.4.1 so they have no dependency on external QT4 packages. These packages do not come by default with RedHat EL and CentOS and these statically linked rpms make it easier to use Firewall Builder on these Linux distributions.

This new major version comes with support for ipv6 in iptables, pf and Cisco IOS access lists and many improvements in the GUI and policy compilers. Full list of features and more information <a href="http://www.fwbuilder.org/docs/firewall_builder_3_features.html">is available here</a>

This build is considered release candidate. It includes improvements in the policy compiler for iptables for ipv6 firewalls. GUI now has built-in help pages for the "advanced" settings dialogs for iptables and PF firewalls.

This revision comes with built-in help; first dialogs to get help panels are "advanced" settings dialogs for the iptables firewall. Help panels explain all options and parameters in the corresponding dialogs. Command line tool fwbedit underwent complete redesign. Fwbedit can now add, remove and modify objects in the .fwb file from the command line. New command line switches and new functions make fwbedit a "swiss army knife" tool for firewall builder scripting. This revision also includes changes in the GUI to improve stability and fix problems with drag&drop of objects between different data files. Code now compiles with gcc 4.3 on Fedora Core 9 and Mandriva Cooker. Binary RPMs for Fedora Core 9 are provided.

Beta testing of Firewall Builder 3.0 continues. This revision includes bug fixes in the GUI in the rule grouping functions and patches to make code compile with gcc 4.3 and fixes for x86 platform.

Beta testing of Firewall Builder 3.0 continues. This release includes bug fixes in the GUI, built-in policy installer and compiler for iptables that make them more stable. Dialog for the IPv6 address object now provides a button that performs DNS address resolution using AAAA DNS records so the user does not have to type long IPv6 addresses manually. Host settings dialog for the firewall object now provides control to turn on/off IPv6 forwarding in addition to the similar control for the IPv4 forwarding. A few additional standard ICMPv6 objects have been added to the "Standard objects" library. Complete list can be found in the ChangeLog.

This new major version comes with support for ipv6 in iptables and pf and many improvements in the GUI and policy compilers. More details in this forum post:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2104483&forum_id=16372