IPTABLES Commands

IPTables

-         Iptables is a command-line firewall utility that uses policy chains to allow or block traffic. When a connection tries to establish itself on your system, iptables looks for a rule in its list to match it to. If it doesn’t find one, it resorts to the default action.

Types of Chains

Iptables uses three different chains: input, forward, and output

a>   Input – This chain is used to control the behavior for incoming connections. For example, if a user attempts to SSH into your PC/server, iptables will attempt to match the IP address and port to a rule in the input chain.

b>  Forward – This chain is used for incoming connections that aren’t actually being delivered locally. Think of a router – data is always being sent to it but rarely actually destined for the router itself; the data is just forwarded to its target. Unless you’re doing some kind of routing, Nating, or something else on your system that requires forwarding, you won’t even use this chain.

·         There’s one sure-fire way to check whether or not your system uses/needs the forward chain.
      # iptables -L –v

c>   Output – This chain is used for outgoing connections. For example, if you try to ping howtogeek.com, iptables will check its output chain to see what the rules are regarding ping and howtogeek.com before making a decision to allow or deny the connection attempt.
      # Iptables –L |grep policy

·         Above command is use to find the default policy for rule that you haven’t define in chain
      # iptables --policy INPUT ACCEPT
# iptables --policy OUTPUT ACCEPT
# iptables --policy FORWARD ACCEPT

If you get above output then iptables ACCEPT such a connection which were not defined.
If output is as follow then iptables drop connection which not define in rule:

# iptables --policy INPUT DROP
# iptables --policy OUTPUT DROP
# iptables --policy FORWARD DROP

Connection-specific Responses

With your default chain policies configured, you can start adding rules to iptables so it knows what to do when it encounters a connection from or to a particular IP address or port. In this guide, we’re going to go over the three most basic and commonly used “responses”.

Accept – Allow the connection.

Drop – Drop the connection, act like it never happened. This is best if you don’t want the source to realize your system exists.

Reject – Don’t allow the connection, but send back an error. This is best if you don’t want a particular source to connect to your system, but you want them to know that your firewall blocked them.

Allowing or Blocking Specific Connections

-A = Append rule to existing chain. Iptables starts at the top of its list and goes through each rule until it finds one that it matches

-I = Insert rule in chain. Iptables add new chain in firewall

As we mentioned earlier, a lot of protocols are going to require two-way communication. For example, if you want to allow SSH connections to your system, the input and output chains are going to need a rule added to them. But, what if you only want SSH coming into your system to be allowed? Won’t adding a rule to the output chain also allow outgoing SSH attempts?

That’s where connection states come in, which give you the capability you’d need to allow two way communication but only allow one way connections to be established. Take a look at this example, where SSH connections FROM 10.10.10.10 are permitted, but SSH connections TO 10.10.10.10 are not. However, the system is permitted to send back information over SSH as long as the session has already been established, which makes SSH communication possible between these two hosts.

# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport ssh -s 10.10.10.10 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

# iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 22 -d 10.10.10.10 -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

Saving Changes

The changes that you make to your iptables rules will be scrapped the next time that the iptables service gets restarted unless you execute a command to save the changes.  This command can differ depending on your distribution:

Ubuntu:

sudo /sbin/iptables-save

Red Hat / CentOS:

/sbin/service iptables save

Or

/etc/init.d/iptables save

List the currently configured iptables rules:

# iptables -L

Delete Firewall Rules

To display line number along with other information for existing rules, enter:
# iptables -L INPUT -n --line-numbers
# iptables -L OUTPUT -n --line-numbers
# iptables -L OUTPUT -n --line-numbers | less
# iptables -L OUTPUT -n --line-numbers | grep 202.54.1.1

You will get the list of IP. Look at the number on the left, then use number to delete it. For example delete line number 4, enter:
# iptables -D INPUT 4

OR find source IP 202.54.1.1 and delete from rule:
# iptables -D INPUT -s 202.54.1.1 -j DROP

Adding the -v option will give you packet and byte information, and adding -n will list everything numerically. In other words – hostnames, protocols, and networks are listed as numbers.

To clear all the currently configured rules, you can issue the flush command.

# iptables -F