Subject: Re: Preferred firewall

From: Prabu Anand Kalivaradhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:06:15 +0530

The wiki page https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How-To_Alpine_Wall has been
updated.

---

From: "W. Michael Petullo" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2026 07:45:59 -0600

> The wiki page https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How-To_Alpine_Wall has been

Thank you for the updates to the documentation, Prabu.

I have some points to consider about the changes:

(1) Under "Activating/Applying a Policy" is "awall enable test-policy".
I think that should be "awall enable home-policy", since the example has
the policy definition in "home-policy.json".

(2) I like that you compared AWall to Shorewall, but a reader might not
be familiar with Shorewall. You could make this more clear with the
following changes:

+ [Add the following immediately after the "Configuration files"
heading] This guide shows how to configure a firewall using AWall. Also
shown are comparable Shorewall configurations, as Shorewall is another
firewall configuration tool used in many applications. This comparison is
meant to help readers who are familiar with Shorewall learn AWall. You
should follow the AWall examples. Use the Shorewall examples as
contextual references, or ignore them if unfamiliar with Shorewall.

and

- [Remove] The below example shows the "Basic home firewall" configuration for both
Shorewall and AWall. Based on below example, it can be clearly seen that
AWall Policy files are not equivalent to Shorewall's /etc/shorewall/policy
files.

+ [Replace with] The examples below show how to configure a basic home
firewall using AWall. Note that AWall Policy files differ substantially
from Shorewall's /etc/shorewall/policy files in syntax and layout.

and

- [Remove] Let's suppose you have the following Shorewall configuration: 

+ [Replace with] Let's suppose you have the following Shorewall configuration, which
you want to convert to a configuration for AWall.

Thanks again!

-- 
Mike

:wq

---

From: Prabu Anand Kalivaradhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:28:13 +0530

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the additionl suggestions. I've gone through the page and made
the suggested changes and added few wikilinks. I'm not a awall user, so
appreciate if some awall user can verify the correctness of the page.

Regards,
Prabu