ebtables - sourceforge page - downloads - browse cvs - bridge - netfilter

Free firewall software distributed under GNU General Public License

Ethernet bridge tables. A firewalling tool to transparently filter network traffic passing a bridge. The filtering possibilities are limited to link layer filtering and some basic filtering on higher network layers. Advanced logging, MAC DNAT/SNAT and brouter facilities are also included.
The ebtables tool can be used together with the other Linux filtering tools, iptables/ip6tables/arptables. There are no incompatibility issues.

This site also contains the latest ebtables/bridge-nf patches for the 2.4 kernel series.

The arptables userspace tool is also maintained here.

ebtables' logo was made with xfig and the gimp.

I presume, when you pronounce iptables, you are saying that you are peeing tables. In an analogous fashion you should pronounce ebtables. So, you first pronounce the letter 'e' in English, then the letter 'b' in English, followed by the English word tables: e-b-tables. Doesn't sound too bad, right?

The project currently has as main developer Bart De Schuymer <bdschuym_at_pandora.be>, the biggest non-developer contributions to the code were made by Nick Fedchik <nick_at_fedchik.org.ua> and Grzegorz Borowiak <grzes_at_gnu.univ.gda.pl>. Nick made the vlan match and getethertype.c, he was also very helpful when adding additional documentation. Grzegorz wrote the arpreply target and among match. Since ebtables is open source, anyone can add new code or improve existing code. Now and then others make contributions, which is very much appreciated.

The licence under which this software is released is the GPLv2, which is the same licence as the Linux kernel uses. Read the GNU GPL licence text (version 2) for the exact specification.

The generic code and modularity are derived from the iptables implementation, of which the main author is Paul `Rusty' Russell. Some things are done differently, however.