[Wolves] twisted firestarter - more ubuntu questions

[James Turner]

On Monday 10 Oct 2005 15:12, Stuart Langridge wrote:
> > Good idea, I'll try that tonight. What worries is me is that if I'm
> > using firestarter to specify policies, surely they won't be in place
> > if it's not running?
>
> Nope. As I understand it, Firestarter isn't itself a firewall. It's an
> admin console for the built in firewall, iptables. So making changes
> in Firestarter makes changes to your iptables configuration, and
> iptables *does* start up when your machine starts.

If it's built into the kernel, as might be the case on a dedicated 
firewall/router distro, iptables would be running from the outset, although 
not necessarily with any rules defined (at first).

As a module, it could be loaded either using modprobe or automatically the 
first time an iptables/ip6tables command was run - such as iptables-restore, 
which might be used to load a setup "dropped" into the appropriate place by 
an admin console like firestarter. Additional modules (e.g. ipt_conntrack for 
connection tracking) should load automatically when a rule is set that makes 
use of them.

In a modular kernel environment, you can find out if it's running by typing:

lsmod

(or maybe /sbin/lsmod if not included in the path). ip_tables should be 
listed, probably accompanied by a handful of other modules with names 
beginning in ipt.

To see if there are any rules defined, enter (as root):

iptables -vL -t <table>

where <table> is either filter, nat, mangle or raw. Change -vL to -L for a 
listing that doesn't take up so much width on the screen.

Regards,

James