Hello All ! I have been having this problem for quite a while and decided to make a post about it. If you run a RedHat distri, and don't want to compile anything, just using RPM (especially if you plan to maintain your server with RHN), you get this error trying to use the string matching option: # iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -m string --string HELLO iptables v1.x.x: Couldn't load match `string':/lib/iptables/libipt_string.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Where is this library ? # find / -name libipt_string.so # Hmmm... Obviously not included in any of the iptables RPMs provided by redhat. So I downloaded the matching iptables1.x.x.tar.bz2 from netfilter.org, and found the libipt_string.c in there. With a "make", this library doesn't get compiled... OK, then I will compile it myself, then: cc -O2 -Wall -I etc.. etc... ipt_strings.h not found... and can't seem to find this file anywhere.. not even in the redhat kernel source rpm .... Anybody has an idea on how to make "iptables --m string" work with RedHat ? Thanks All !!!
