Hi,

i have a machine acting as a gateway and connected to internal and external network. Firstly i need to allow only http and smtp services to the external netwrok, bcoz i have appache running on one of internal network . How do i do that????


secondly what does ESTABLISHED RELATED and NEW mean. i have been reading about this on the web and could hardly understand the need. can someone make me clear about this with example if possible.


Regards,

Gautam
Center for information and Netwrok Security

To block off all unwanted connections:
# Allow http
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
# Allow smtp
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j ACCEPT
# Drop everything else
iptables -P INPUT DROP

ESTABLISHED RELATED and NEW are connection states - you can use them to say that only certain types of connction are allowed to pass through a rules table.

It's particularly usefull in the ftp passive mode, it actually know the state of a connexion.

control channel
on port 21 you write your two rules, with new and established
data channel
on >1024 port you write your two rules with related and established
Related means that another connexion has been previously opened.

You'll find many exemples about this on the internet.

Another exemple is
# Allow you to connect to http servers
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
Imagine you just open this on your machine, some may think they are protected from scans because they block all incomming ports except the ones from remote port 80 because you need to accept dialog with the http server.
But imagine the evil guy specifies his source port as 80 to scan your machine, then it's like you didn't have any firewall.

Solution :
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 80 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT #This is the first rule used when the connection is opened

So now if someone scans from port 80, packets will be droped because no connexion would have been previously opened to match this rule
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 80 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

If it doesn't make sense it might be my english and/or read more documentation about this.

Cheers

Thanxs david and miky for your kind help....

:-)

Regards,
Gautam