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Monday, December 28, 2009

How to save/restore iptables rules on Ubuntu?

This might be an obvious thing to old Linux-heads out there, but it sure caught me off-guard, so there might be some use in spelling it out:

iptables-save and iptables-restore do not actually save/load the iptables rules to/from an external file. You are responsible for redirecting the output of iptables-save to a file and modifying the interface-up scripts such that it is loaded before the given interface comes up.

The Ubuntu documentation tells you how (although, it also was the source of my confusion) - the following commands should be executed as root, so don't forget to sudo su first:

  1. Save your rules in a file: iptables-save >/etc/iptables.rules
  2. Edit your interfaces file (substitute your own favorite editor here): nano /etc/network/interfaces
  3. Add a pre-up command to restore the saved rule. The fully configured file should look similar to this (the bold line is the one added):
    auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp
      pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.rules
    

HTH. And remember - security is a process / mindset, not a state. Always test the configuration changes you've done, don't just assume that everything went ok because you didn't receive error messages.

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