How Shorewall depends on iptables ?

kumaramit · 02-09-2015, 05:03 AM

Running Shorewall latest with webmin (Web based) UI. As I understood, shorewall uses iptables internally, So how can I relate INPUT, OUTPUT,FORWARD chain of iptables to the configuration files of shorewall. Are both different and can't be compared ? Like If I have written some rule using iptable command, can I see it in shorewall file, If yes then where?

michaelk · 02-09-2015, 03:02 PM

Shorewall is a firewall configuration tool. In a nutshell netfilter is the kernel module and iptables is the user program.

shorewall uses the configuration files to create the rule set and then loads them via iptables. If you add a rule via the iptables command it will not automatically be saved in a shorewall configuration file. I don't use shorewall but yes you should be able to compare the two.