Overview
Nexwall Firewall is a network security appliance for organizations and for the service providers that look after them. It runs as a ready-made disk image on ordinary x86 hardware or on a virtual machine, and it is administered from a web interface. Under the hood it is built on OpenWrt, a mature Linux distribution designed for network devices, and on well-known open source components such as nftables, Snort, OpenVPN, strongSwan and WireGuard.
What it does
| Area | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Filtering | Control traffic between networks with zone based rules, NAT and port forwarding |
| Protection | Block applications, stop intrusions, filter malicious domains, and block hostile addresses or whole countries |
| Connectivity | Use several internet links with failover and balancing, shape bandwidth, and run DHCP and DNS |
| Remote access and sites | Give users secure remote access and connect offices with site-to-site tunnels |
| Visibility | See live connections, traffic statistics, performance charts and logs |
| Operations | Back up, update and restore units, keep them highly available, and manage many of them from one place |
How the documentation is organized
The administration guide follows the menu of the web interface, so you can find a page by looking for the menu entry you are using:
- Getting started and Installation explain what you need to bring a unit into service.
- Operation & Analytics covers the dashboard, live traffic, performance and logs.
- Policy covers rules, NAT, zones and objects.
- Security Services covers application control, the intrusion prevention system, DNS filtering and IP or country blocking.
- Network, VPN, Access & Identity, Infrastructure and Administration cover the rest of the menu.
- Help collects troubleshooting steps organized by symptom, and a command line reference.
:::tip Start here If you are setting up a unit for the first time, read Quick start next. If you want to understand the terms used everywhere else, read Concepts. :::
Editions and features
Some features depend on a subscription, for example the larger application catalog, encrypted cloud backups and the advanced Threat Shield lists. Where a page describes such a feature, it says so. See Licensing and account for how a subscription is activated.