Hey all,
With the release of Mageia Linux 8, I wanted to highlight something that may be interesting to the FirewallD community: the introduction of a new tool by Mageia's ManaTools team: ManaFirewall[1].
The ManaFirewall tool is a rewrite of the drakfirewall tool that has been part of the Mandriva/Mageia Control Center for decades. The old tool was written in Perl and used Shorewall, this new one is written in Python 3 and uses FirewallD. Additionally, since it uses the ManaTools application framework[2], it automatically has Qt5, GTK3, and ncurses based UIs through its usage of the libyui library[3] from the folks at SUSE along with Mageia's extensions[4].
In addition to being available for Mageia Linux 8, I have also brought it to Fedora. As it requires FirewallD 0.9.0 or higher, I have built it for Fedora 34 and Rawhide, and submitted it as an update for Fedora 34[5].
The ManaFirewall tool is relatively new and the functionality isn't to the same level as firewall-config yet, but the long-term goal is to reach feature parity and provide a comfortable experience managing FirewallD regardless of environment (desktop or server).
If anyone is interested in contributing to helping make this a reality, they are very welcome! The ManaTools team is available on the #manatools IRC channel on Freenode.
[1]: https://github.com/manatools/manafirewall [2]: https://github.com/manatools/python-manatools [3]: https://github.com/libyui/libyui [4]: https://github.com/manatools/libyui-mga [5]: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2021-9867a3782a