Morning.
Afternoon.
Well, spent a better part of the night playing with IPTables. Tried out some rules, tweaked this, broke that. Was a lot of fun.
Anyway, as I am getting ready to make one of my servers go live, I realized something that I completely overlooked. Very important thing I might add.
Basically, once you put all your rules into IPTables via the command line, how do you save your rules? I saw a command, iptables-save, but that just outputs the rules in a readable format.
I started thinking and came up with the following:
1) Does iptables read the init script in /etc/init.d/ upon bootup of a server/box and use those rules for the system?
YES.
or
2) Does it read a plain text file some where an use those rules instead?
YES. /etc/sysconfig/iptables
wasn't quite sure and since im going on 22 hours without sleep, im positive I missed it some where.
With that in mind, was hoping someone could fill in the details.
IF it is the case the the system reads the iptables init script upon bootup/restart, that means I need to work on my scripting. :)
Anyways, hoping for a little clarity here.
Cheers,
Jason
You can do couple of things:
- After you enter your commands from a shell, you can do a *service iptables save*. All the commands that you had entered will be stored in the *iptables* file in /etc/sysconfig. By the way this is the file the system reads while boot up to load the firewall configuration.
- You can directly edit this file to add new commands (though it is not recommended, but I still do it 'coz it makes life easier) and then run *iptables-restore* to load the new configuration.
Hope this helps.
Deepak Seshadri
