On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 11:18:55AM +0200, Mart Frauenlob wrote: > Besides there's also iptables-xml (not sure when it came up), which can > give you a unified output. Reading man iptables-xml the way back is > possible like: > Conversion from XML to iptables-save format may be done using the > iptables.xslt script and xsltproc, or a custom program using libxsltproc > or similar; in this fashion: > > xsltproc iptables.xslt my-iptables.xml | iptables-restore > > >> > >> I have prototype in python that does such normalization and is able > >> to output "patch" for existing rules according to given new rules. > >> Script generates -N/-X/-F/-P/-I/-D/-A rules via standard python difflib > >> and is pretty effective and simle (90 lines) but requires rules in > >> comparable form and this is the harder part of my problem (2662 lines). > > I bet python has loads of xml libs. I should clarify some facts about my conditions. Whole iptables ruleset is represented by few files in /etc. Some of them are generated, some of them are hand written. I am able to feed /etc rules to iptables-restore or execute them as shell script. This is trivial. Although iptables-restore is faster than executing iptables in shell script, it is still very slow sometimes. Changes in /etc ruleset are small but frequent. But primarily both solutions reset couters if used and it is not good for me now. So I ended with script that does incremental updates. My script takes iptables-save output as first argument and desired ruleset declared in /etc files as second argument (but generally any two inputs). In first step it converts both inputs to comparable form and builds ruleset in internal representation. Then comes iptables_diff method, that is able to generate two rules iptables -D SSH 10 iptables -I SSH 10 -j REJECT -s 2.3.2.3 if rule 10 in chain SSH differs in first and second ruleset. It mostly works but it needs constant maintenance because of changes in iptables itself so I am not satisfied. I believe that it works as I intended because this utility dramaticaly lower reload times of firewalls on our busy routers. As I said, changes are small. Restoring 10000 rules via iptables-restore is often more slow than my python processing and executing two iptables commands. I know iptables-xml. It is mostly wrapper around iptables-save output. It doesn't help much, because it doesnt convert '--dport ssh' to '--dport 22' during processing /etc/ files. First form I have in /etc (readability of hand written files should be preserved), second form I get from kernel via iptables-save. How can I compare them? I hope that it is more clear now. Thanks Radek Kanovsky -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html