Shorewall (shell-based compiler for Shoreline Firewall) The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as "Shorewall", is a Netfilter (iptables) based firewall that can be used on a dedicated firewall system, a multi-function gateway/router/server or on a standalone GNU/Linux system. This is the shell compiler part of Shorewall that allows running Shorewall with legacy configurations, but shorewall-perl is the preferred compiler, please use it for new installations. You will also need the shorewall-common package.