1. maintain and setup complicated firewall rules ferm allows one to reduce the tedious task of carefully inserting rules and chains by a large factor, thus enabling the firewall administrator to spend more time on developing good rules then the proper implementation of the rule. ferm supports ipchains firewalls, ipfwadm rules and iptables firewalls. Changing to another system will be very easy, and ferm will help in the process. ferm compiles ready to go firewall-rules from a structured rule- setup. These rules will be executed by the preferred kernel interface, such as ipchains(8) and iptables(8). ferm will also add in modularizing firewalls, because it creates the possibility to split up the firewall into several different files, which can be reloaded at will, so you can dynamically adjust your rules. ferm, pronounced "firm", stands for "For Easy Rule Making". From Debian 3.0r0 APT