Hi, I think to solve your problem you could work around it by using a series of awk grep and sed commands along with iptables -vL to test if your rule is loaded, presently that is how i get my current ip etc.. man awk, man grep, man sed for example: EXTIP="`/sbin/ifconfig ppp0 | grep 'inet adr' | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/.*$ Regards, Tim > -----Message d'origine----- > De : netfilter-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:netfilter- > bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] De la part de `VL > Envoyé : vendredi 8 avril 2005 09:00 > À : netfilter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Objet : Feature request: ability to test if rule is loaded > > Hello all. > > I recently started to configure my firewall and decided to write some > more advanced shell scripts to make loading of rules easier. My task > was to have a config which looks like: > > loadrule client/ssh on/off > loadrule server/sshd on/off > > and i want the ability to run script, which will go thorough this list > and will load rules that are not yet loaded, and remove rules, that > marked off, if they are loaded. > > client/ssh is a file, that contains something like this: > > NAME="SSH Client" > RULES_NUM="2" > MY_SSH_SERVER1="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" > > RULE[0]="OUTPUT -o eth0 -p tcp...." > RULE[1]="INPUT -i eth0 ...." > > When i want to add rule, my function loadrule runs iptables -A > RULE[0,1...], if i want to disable rule, i call iptables -D > RULE[0,1...] > > But! How do i test if rule was loaded? If i delete rules, i get an > error if rule is not loaded, if i add rules, it just added next in > chain. > > So, it would be nice to have new iptables option, i think -T , which > will act like -D with one exception: it will not delete rule, just > return true if rule exists in chain, and false otherwise. > > It seems to me that it is very easy to add, and that it will be > usefull for system administrators. > > For example, if we can`t turn of firewall on critical server, > administrator have to manually review list of rules and delete some, > he decided to remove by some reasons. With my approach he just changes > 1 line in readable config to off, and asks script to reload config. > > What do you think ?