IPTables or Firewall

vijaysoft · 07-19-2012, 12:29 AM

I am confused over the use of IPTables and Firewall. I have IPTables set with masquerade for internet sharing. Since IPtables is in place shall I disable Firewall that can be viewed from System->Administration menu? Where I have to implement Firwall rules in IPTables? I am using Redhat 5.

bluekill14 · 07-19-2012, 01:19 AM

Hi vijaysoft, afaik when they say firewall its the GUI counterpart of iptables, if you are proficient enough in IPTables you can setup firewall rules in it. As per experience in SLES, if I disable GUI Firewall it also flushes all the rules of my iptables.

NM04 · 07-19-2012, 01:32 AM

vijaysoft,
There is a rc.firewall bash script, which runs the CLI frontend "iptables" which configures "netfilter", this is linux firewall.

cheers,
nm

vijaysoft · 07-19-2012, 01:43 AM

bluekill14,

Thanks for your input. You are right. When I added a new Trusted item to my GUI Firewall, I lost all the iptable configuration which has masquerade settings in it. I am wondering is there any way to recover the old configuration.

bluekill14 · 07-19-2012, 03:13 AM

There is no way to recover if you don't have a backup of your iptables configuration

To save:

Quote:

iptables-save > /home/yourusername/iptables.bak

To restore:

Quote:

iptables-restore < /home/yourusername/iptables.bak

I am really not familiar on the GUI way of setting it. Using iptables to set firewall rules is really hard to digest at first, but once you get used to it you will like and love it.

chrism01 · 07-19-2012, 08:10 PM

Actually, 'firewall' is the concept, 'iptables' is a specific implementation.
See also mta (concept) vs eg sendmail or postfix or ... (implementations)

jschiwal · 07-19-2012, 08:27 PM

Sorry, misread which disto you were using. You might want to check if there is a background process which periodically backs up items in /etc/sysconfig/ and other files in /etc/. It may back up the config files your system uses for the firewall interface.