Hey all

I have set up a redhat firewall using iptables protecting a redhat 8 server running services. It works fine and the only allows to the ports I wish, however when trying to gain access to a proted port eg ftp the connection just hangs. Is it possible to get a 'connection refused' message back instead?

Also, I have had to set the 2 NICs on the firewall to different subnets, otherwise they don't forward. Is this the only was to set them up? And I can only access the server by using SNAT or MASQ. Is there any way I can just forward the packets through so they keep their original source address?

Thanks in advance

The connection hangs because packets are silently being dropped, this is a result of DROP action in iptables. Usually this is preferred (at least, to outside connections) but in some cases you want to refuse the connection and let the client know you're not going to take it. I think iptables has something like a REJECT which would cause "connection refused" instead of a time-out.

Next, yes you have to put each NIC on it's own subnet. You cause all kinds of routing "Badness(TM)" if you attempt to put two NICs from one machine on the same network. That especially won't work well for a firewall since you're accepting packets off the wire and putting them back on the same network, you won't be able to do a lot of spoofing detection, etc.

That's great chort thanks man. Cheers for the quick reply too!!!

One last thing, if I want to refer to an entire subnet, would I be right in using 192.168.0.0 or 192.168.1.0 etc?

Well generally IPs that end in 0 are network numbers, but there's no way of telling what size the network is from just the IP, that's why people use subnet notation. Dotted decimal is very commonly recognized (192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0) but CIDR is preferred because it's more compact (192.168.0.0/16).

If you mean in an iptables rule, I *think* iptables recognizes CIDR notation, but I'm not certain (since I don't have any Linux boxes any more).