A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux®: Fedora™ Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Third Edition

Chapter 25. iptables: Setting Up a Firewall

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IN THIS CHAPTER

How iptables Works	764
Rules, matches, targets, and chains	764
Network packet	765
Jumps and targets	766
JumpStart: Building a Firewall Using system-config-securitylevel	768
Anatomy of an iptables Command	769
Building a Set of Rules	770
system-config-securitylevel: Generates a Set of Rules	777
Sharing an Internet Connection Using NAT	779

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The iptables utility builds and manipulates network packet filtering rules in the Linux kernel. You can use iptables to create a firewall that protects a system from malicious users and to set up NAT (Network Address Translation, page 1044), which can allow multiple systems to share a single Internet connection. The iptables utility is flexible and ...