The Coyote Linux firewall project has been inactive for nearly 20 years and a new version is finally in the works.
The Coyote project was originally started in 1999 as a way to securely share a broadband Internet connection with multiple computers on a home or small business network. The name Coyote was originally chosen as the target broadband provider was Time Warner Cable’s “Road Runner” cable Internet.
To keep up with the massive changes to technology, connection speeds, the way we use the Internet, and the serious nature of online security, Coyote is being re-engineered from the ground up. New versions of Coyote will be much more robust and have a vastly different set of hardware requirements. While older versions focused heavily on being absolutely minimalistic, new versions of Coyote will aim to have a more complete feature set while still maintaining a very small footprint.
The current development environment being put together utilizes the Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (WSL2) and Visual Studio Code. With the firewall image testing being carried out in both Hyper-V virtual environments and on the target hardware platforms for potential commercial product deployment.
New versions of Coyote will remain Open Source with the code base being buildable on both native Linux installations as well as WSL2 under Windows 11.