[Shorewall-announce] Re: [Shorewall-users] Future of Shorewall (was Shorewall-1.3.13)

[Tom Eastep]

--On Wednesday, January 15, 2003 8:57 AM +0000 Julian Church 
<jc at ljchurch.co.uk> wrote:

> Tom
>
> There's no reason you should let a complete stranger question your better
> judgement, but weren't you supposed to be taking a break from all of this?
>

The problem I am having is "Now what do I do with myself in the early 
mornings and evenings?":

a) It's winter here so I can't work out in the yard (and I really don't 
enjoy that much anyway).
b) I don't care for television except for sports.
c) My parents and my wife's mother (where my wife is staying) live 4-5 
hours away (each way) so it's not as if I can run out and see them in the 
evenings.
d) Going for walks in the dark is ok but....
e) I read a couple of hours a day and that's enough.

It has given me a chance to ponder the future of Shorewall though and I've 
concluded that the Shorewall community has reached the size where I can't 
do all of the jobs by myself:

a) Designer/developer
b) Support/Free Networking Consultant
c) Documentation
d) Web site administration
e) Mail Server administration
f) Mailing List/Search engine administration (Including spam control)

Trying to do all of these jobs, handling my own full-time job, and caring 
for aging and ill parents is becoming too much. The result is that I have 
developed a very short fuse when it comes to questions on the user's list; 
I'm sure that all of you who subscribe have noticed. And a number of you 
have stepped forward to help with the support load for which I am extremely 
grateful.

With the kind help of Alex Martin, I'm getting out of the business of 
running a web site (although as of this moment, I'm still responsible for 
the content and I still have responsibility for running the mailing 
list/search engine web interfaces).

Recently, several of you have begun sending me patches for inclusion in 
Shorewall. I think that's great and I very much welcome your participation. 
Unfortunately, with everything else I have to do to run this project, 
evaluating patches is still pretty low on my priority list. Please be 
patient.

So I'm still looking for more volunteers.

a) Maintainer of the Samples -- There has been a lot of pleading about 
"Don't take away the comments in the config files!!!!". Most of you have to 
update the comments in one configuration and you probably don't install 
every release. Maintaining the samples requires updating the %$#@ comments 
in THREE configurations on EVERY release. The comments in the 
shorewall.conf file in the .lrp also have to be updated for each release 
since that file is different from the standard one.

b) Maintainer of the .lrp. -- We have maintainers for Debian and GenToo -- 
would be great if someone stepped forward to be the maintainer of the .lrp 
(preferably someone who runs Bering and can actually test the thing before 
it goes out the door).

c) Documentation -- There are a number of areas where the documentation 
still needs expansion. For example, we have several outstanding questions 
on the ML about multiple IPSEC tunnels and how to configure them. I know 
that there are people on this list that have experience in that area 
whereas I don't. Now I have a good idea about how to go about configuring 
such a setup but I don't have the time, energy or resources to actually do 
it.

We've also had the suggestion that a text version of the documentation 
would be good for installation on firewall boxes without X. Good idea but I 
didn't hear anyone volunteering to do it. So in a very real sense, this 
becomes another "Hey, Tom -- here's something else that YOU can do for US 
in your spare time".

A number of these things would probably be easier if the documentation was 
translated to SGML -- I've thought about it but it is not something that's 
ever popped to the top of my stack of things to do.

I also have a suspicion that someone who is competent in web site design 
(which certainly excludes me) could make the web site/documentation a lot 
easier to navigate.

d) Mailing List/Search engine administration -- I would love to get this 
off of my site. The two must go together because of the size of the archive 
that needs to be indexed daily. Right now, an MTA somewhere in Hitachi is 
bouncing list posts as Spam and I haven't had a chance to deal with it yet.

Unless other folks become involved in an active and ongoing way with this 
project, Shorewall can't continue to grow -- there are only so many hours 
in my day and no more.

-Tom
--
Tom Eastep   \ Shorewall - iptables made easy
AIM: teastep  \ http://shorewall.sf.net
ICQ: #60745924 \ teastep at shorewall.net