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Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] "Firewall ACL Rules" needs a better User's Guide explanation

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 01:13:25 +0200
Hi List!

The current description of the rules are unfortunately "virtually none existing":

"This allows you to create command-line ACL rules for many different firewall products, including Cisco IOS, Linux Netfilter (iptables), OpenBSD pf and Windows Firewall (via netsh). Rules for MAC addresses, IPv4 addresses, TCP and UDP ports, and IPv4+port combinations are supported.

It is assumed that the rules will be applied to an outside interface."

Although this description is better than nothing, it won't help a lot as it's way too brief.

Without describing the corresponding dialog and ways to apply the corresponding rules to the actual firewall products.

While reading the current explanation the following questions remain:

- what is an outside interface?
- what is ACL? ok, this might be obvious from the context
- why are four products mentioned out of six from the dialog?
- how do I actually apply these rules to my firewall?
- which address type is used under which circumstance? are they somehow combinable?

For the User's Guide: Keep in mind to speak to a person who isn't really familiar with firewall ACL rules at all and will do it for the first time ...

<rant>It's a bit discouraging to maintain the User's Guide and see that developers still seem to think that documenting is someone else's problem and not worth taking some time - compared to implement the actual function taking hours or even days - and leaving the new feature almost useless for Joe Average.</rant>

I wouldn't have a big problem to "docbook format" a plain text file explanation and find the right place to add it to the User's Guide, but I won't try to find out the information myself.

Again: Without a proper explanation, this function will be much less helpful for the occasional user than it could be and an experienced user probably won't even need it.

Regards, ULFL