## Some Things that Shorewall Does Not Do

### Tom Eastep

Copyright © 2003-2009 Thomas M Eastep

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

2026/01/29

### Caution

This article applies to Shorewall 3.0 and later. If you are running a version of Shorewall earlier than Shorewall 3.0.0 then please see the documentation for that release

## Shorewall Does not:

- Act as a “Personal Firewall” that allows Internet access control by application. If that's what you are looking for, try TuxGuardian.

- Work with an Operating System other than Linux (version >= 2.4.0)

- Act as a Proxy (although it can be used with a separate proxy such as Squid or Socks).

- Do content filtering:

  - HTTP - better to use Squid, E2guardian, or Parental Control for that.

  - Email -- Install something like Postfix on your firewall and integrate it with SpamAssassin , Amavisd-new and Clamav

- Configure/manage Network Devices (your Distribution includes tools for that).

## In Addition:

- Shorewall generally does not contain any support for Netfilter xtables-addons features -- Shorewall only supports features from released kernels except in unusual cases.