Is ipfw available in Mountain Lion? The reason for asking is that they introduced pf in Lion, but kept ipfw, however there is a chance that ipfw would eventually be removed.
I found this: Can I use ipfw on OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion), but that was asked before releasing Mountain Lion and there is no answer.
Best Answer
Yes it is. I use it for my firewall needs. A great way to test if it still exists, is to just run it. Open Terminal.app and enter the following command:
It should report the following (rules may vary):
Additionally, Apple will not remove it as it is actually the backend for the default Application Firewall found in System Preferences, at least not for some time.
You can read up more on ipfw in OS X using Apple's Manual Page (or simply type
man ipfwin Terminal.app).As for pf (the actual implementation of OS X is
pfctl), it is a much more object orientated program that can control network access translation and packet filter (whileipfwrequires external components to handle them). It is born from OpenBSD (as opposed to FreeBSD) and has been around for quite a while as well. It's power comes from being able to accomplish more internally, but also optimize long rulesets (that sometimes bogsipfwdown). They are both, however, excellent firewalls and can coexist quite happily. You can read more about the differences between pf and ipfw, here.