Linux Iptables Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference

by Gregor N. Purdy

Firewalls, Network Address Translation (NAT), network logging and accounting are all provided by Linux's Netfilter system, also known by the name of the command used to administer it, iptables . The iptables interface is the most sophisticated ever offered on Linux and makes Linux an extremely flexible system for any kind of network filtering you might do. Large sets of filtering rules can be grouped in ways that makes it easy to test them and turn them on and off. Do you watch for all types of ICMP traffic--some of them quite dangerous? Can you take advantage of stateful filtering to simplify the management of TCP connections? Would you like to track how much traffic of various types you get? This pocket reference will help you at those critical moments when someone asks you to open or close a port in a hurry, either to enable some important traffic or to block an attack. The book will keep the subtle syntax straight and help you remember all the values you have to enter in order to be as secure as possible. The book has an introductory section that describes applications,followed by a reference/encyclopaedic section with all the matches and targets arranged alphabetically.

Genres: Technical, Technology, Computers

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jascha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading this book for the first time back in 2013 but a couple of months ago I planned to give it a second try, not sure what I was expecting to magically find there. So despite postdating it some four to five times, I have finally dedicated a couple of days' commute time to this title, a quite outdated and thin book about iptables. A must know for any System Administrator, iptables is a technology tbat has been there since forever and that hasn't experienced any real revolution lately, which makes this book still valid despite being more than 10 years old. Incredibly, despite being such a fundamental powertool in every Sys Admin's belt out there, Amazon's bookshelf only has a handful of titles dedicated to it; tons covering security overall, but iptables itself less than a page of results. Google is not more merciful: the pages covering the basics and providing real-world examples are very limited. Is iptables some kind of ...secret?

Evaluating this book is somehow challenging: most people buy this title thinking that they have bought something else. What follows is a poor rating and a couple of bitter lines as a review. What is this book? As the title suggests, this book is a reference. It does explain iptables' options and quirks, up to the very bits. Each and everything iptables allows the enthusiast to do is religiously reported. Mind it, written, not explained. This leads to the hardest question: what is not this book? This book is not an introductory text neither to security nor to iptables. It does not explain iptables role in the 7 levels ISO/OSI stakc. It does not provide any real example. Similarly, it does not show, step by step, how to configure a gateway firewall to protect services X and Y from malicious outsiders.

Linux Iptables Pocket Reference is meant to be used by System Administrators, as well as by developers that are involved in low level network programming (Openstack Neutron?). It does expect the reader to know its way through both network security overall and iptables in particular. This makes it a target of a very limited niche of professionals, not the casual enthusiast.

Overall a very concise book, no doubts. I am personally not sure this book is a good suggestion to System Administrators. Not only great answers can be found on Stack Overflow, but man pages are there for a reason. It is certainly not recommended to anyone who is interested in getting started with network security and iptables. There are better choices out there.

Suggested readings:
Linux Firewalls: an excellent introduction to iptables, with examples explained step-by-step. It also covers incident response.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

[Jean Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a nice little compact iptables book. If you are unfamiliar with iptables or nat it will probably go over your head. It's probably better to start with some knowledge of nat. There are plenty of online iptables tutorials for that purpose. There are no tutorials or exercises but every process is explained clearly.

[Laurent]

Was a good cheat sheet.