Shorewall allows you to describe your firewall/gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files. It reads those configuration files and, with the help of the iptables utility, configures Netfilter to match your requirements.

Shorewall supports a wide range of router/firewall/gateway applications, traffic shaping and almost every type of VPN.

The shorewall-lite package is designed to allow you to maintain all Shorewall configuration information on a single system within your network.