The ipfw system facility allows filtering, redirecting, and other operations on IP packets travelling
through network interfaces.
The default behavior of ipfw is to block all incoming and outgoing traffic. This behavior can be
modified, to allow all traffic through the ipfw firewall by default, by enabling the
IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT kernel option. This option may be useful when configuring ipfw for the
first time. If the default ipfw behavior is to allow everything, it is easier to cope with firewall-
tuning mistakes which may accidentally block all traffic.
To enable logging of packets passing through ipfw, enable the IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE kernel option. The
IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT option will prevent syslogd(8) from flooding system logs or causing local Denial
of Service. This option may be set to the number of packets which will be logged on a per-entry basis
before the entry is rate-limited.
The user interface for ipfw is implemented by the ipfw(8) utility, so please refer to the ipfw(8) manpage
for a complete description of the ipfw capabilities and how to use it.