I am running a 2.6.21 kernel on an ARM architecture with iptables version 1.3.6. Iptables support is compiled into the kernel as modules:

ts7000:~# lsmod | grep iptable
iptable_filter 2368 0
ip_tables 10952 1 iptable_filter

When I try to use iptables I get an error:

ts7000:~# iptables -L
iptables v1.3.6: can't initialize iptables table `filter': Bad file
descriptor
Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.

This is the first time I have used iptables. Is there something else that needs to be done before I can run the above command?

I am constrained to use the kernel (although I can reconfigure it and rebuild it), as it was custom-configured for my platform, but I tried to manually build and install version 1.4.9.1 of iptables and received the same error. I also read that the "Bad file descriptor" error can sometimes mean file system corruption, so I ran fsck on the file system and it is clean.

If anyone can suggest things to try to resolve this problem, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,
Don

As an update, someone suggested that there might be an issue with EABI vs. OABI on the ARM platform, so I reconfigured iptables with --enable-static and --disable-dynamic, since I think that there is not an issue as long as iptables doesn't try to build linking to the EABI-built kernel libraries. After rebuilding, I tried to run "iptables -L" again and this time received a different error:

"getsockopt failed strangely: invalid argument"

As before, if anyone has any suggestions on how I might resolve this error to get iptables working, I'd be very appreciative.

Thanks,
Don

Hi,

I have met the same problem, would you please let me know if you have solution finally?

Thanks!