Introduction to iptables
If you've been around Linux long enough you know there are many ways to secure your box. What you may or may not know is that a number of those means are simply front-ends for the all-mighty iptables tool. IPtables is a very powerful, complicated system which can control packet traffic on your system. It can deny, reject, allow, route, and do just about anything else you want to do with that traffic…all from the command line. Of course, along with this power, comes some serious complexity.
That complexity is what an introductory article is needed. I have seen plenty of users try to just jump into the heart and soul of iptables, only to see them fail miserably. To fully understand iptables one must first understand how iptables is actually used. In this article I will help you to understand the fundamentals of iptables so later on we can further that knowledge with more in-depth scripts and commands.
If you've been around Linux long enough you know there are many ways to secure your box. What you may or may not know is that a number of those means are simply front-ends for the all-mighty iptables tool. IPtables is a very powerful, complicated system which can control packet traffic on your system. It can deny, reject, allow, route, and do just about anything else you want to do with that traffic…all from the command line. Of course, along with this power, comes some serious complexity.
That complexity is what an introductory article is needed. I have seen plenty of users try to just jump into the heart and soul of iptables, only to see them fail miserably. To fully understand iptables one must first understand how iptables is actually used. In this article I will help you to understand the fundamentals of iptables so later on we can further that knowledge with more in-depth scripts and commands.
