SSHGuard VS ferm

There are now better defensive tools (I use https://sshguard.net/); not that there are any accounts on this system that are vulnerable, but it does keep the relevant logfile from growing to astronomical size. Source: about 3 years ago

I remember hating shorewall and similar ones because, well, I know iptables, and I know exactly what I want so using anything that tries to abstract it into it's own approach is torture as I need to take the rules I want and translate it to whatever mediocre paradigm shorewall (or ufw, or near-any other firewall manager in the wild) decided to put on top of iptables. I ended up using ferm... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

I'm a big fan of ferm. Many major distros have it readily available as a package, and it makes for beautifully readable firewall definitions. Source: about 1 year ago

The last time I needed to do complex iptables stuff, I found FERM really helpful. The structured config language greatly reduces the amount of boilerplate code you have to type, while still having a pretty direct mapping to the emitted iptables rules. A bit like compiling sass to css. Source: about 2 years ago

Also just about last thing I want is to deploy another configuration management system alongside the system that manages everything else on machine. Currently we just use Puppet to deploy ferm rules (which is best described as "iptables+", naming convention and such are still iptables-like but a lot of macros/syntax sugar around it). Source: almost 3 years ago