Source and destination addresses cannot be given as a 'group of IPs'. It's true that source and destination addresses CAN be always written as net.work.address/mask, thus allowing you to specify a whole C (your.net.work.0/24 ) network of even networks with different masks. In your case, 192.168.0.25, 192.168.0.26 and 192.168.0.27 cannot be written as network/mask. So you CANNOT write one SINGLE rule to do what you want. You'll probably need to write a single rule for each address. But if you're one of those who are not afraid of source code and recompiling things, you may wanna try iprange iptables module that can be found on patch-o-matic. This module makes possible to specify any given range of IPs as source and/or destination. [root@firewall root]# iptables -m iprange --help iptables v1.2.9 [ ..... looooooots of information ...... ] iprange match v1.2.9 options: [!] --src-range ip-ip Match source IP in the specified range [!] --dst-range ip-ip Match destination IP in the specified range Anyway, neither iprange can be used if your IP addresses are completly different from each other (192.168.0.20, 10.10.2.1, 172.16.3.1, 200.201.202.203) .... in this case you'll for sure have to give several rules, one for each address. Hope this helps you :) Sincerily, Leonardo Rodrigues ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Fontenot" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Net Filter (E-mail)" <netfilter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2003 2:28 PM Subject: Groups in iptables > I would imagine the answer to this is yes, but I haven't found anything on > the subject. If you wanted to limit outbound traffic for a certain port to > certain group of servers is that possible? > > For example, can I create a group: > > MAILSERVERS = 192.168.0.25, 192.168.0.26, 192.168.0.27 > > and use that in a ruleset: > -A INSIDE_ACCESS_OUT -s $MAILSERVERS -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 --tcp-flags > SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j ACCEPT > > and then drop the rest: > -A INSIDE_ACCESS_OUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 -j DROP > > >