Greetings all,

I was in the process of creating a router and secure firewall from my RH-9 box, when "iptables" and "chkconfig" commands quit working. I had gone to bed the night before and my iptables command was working, but when I got home today the commands no longer worked! I didn't change any settings at all.

this is what I see......

[xxx@localhost xxx]# iptables -L
bash: iptables: command not found

and.....

[root@localhost sysconfig]# ./iptables -L
bash: ./iptables: Permission denied

and......

[root@localhost sysconfig]# chmod 777 /etc/sysconfig/iptables
[root@localhost sysconfig]# ./iptables -L
./iptables: line 5: *filter: command not found
./iptables: line 6: :INPUT: command not found
./iptables: line 7: :FORWARD: command not found
./iptables: line 8: :OUTPUT: command not found
./iptables: line 9: :RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT: command not found
./iptables: line 10: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 11: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 12: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 13: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 14: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 15: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 16: -A: command not found
./iptables: line 17: COMMIT: command not found

These weren't my rules and I don't know what they are or how they got there. About 4 hours ago I wiped my hard disk clean and re-installed RH9. I'm still getting the same problems. Does anyone know what is going on? When I first started setting my firewall, I wasn't getting these problems. Any help or comments would be greatly appreciated!

Thank You!
-Slyant

The last set of errors was caused by:
chmod 777 /etc/sysconfig/iptables
which made this file executable

others likely caused by not having /sbin in your $PATH
assuming
ls -l /sbin/iptables
is present

PS: rebooting once in a while OK, wiping & reinstalling when everything else is working NO

Thanks, arnold. I'll check into the $PATH. Any ideas how this happened for apparently no reason? I'd like to fix the problem or learn from any mistakes I made.

/sbin and /usr/sbin are in root's path only; not users' paths.

Any chance you were logged in as root one day but logged in as another user and sued to root the next?