Ubuntu – get your firewall shit out of the way and let me iptables-restore!

Having worked in networking for four years and systems for nigh on six, the last thing in the world I want is some ‘simple’ way to configure my iptables rules.

Having been a Fedora user since way back when it was Redhat 4.2, what I want is the Fedora / Redhat way of putting all of my rules into a single file and having the damn thing do an ‘iptables-restore’ from the file I create.

I finally got really irritated with ufw, went hunting for a solution and found the ‘iptables-persistent’ package within apt which does exactly what I want. Rather than the Fedora ‘/etc/sysconfig/iptables’ you have ‘/etc/iptables/rules’ which does exactly what I both want and expect.

Perhaps this Ubuntu thing isn’t all that bad after all, I’m just still learning how to smack it in the right way to make it do what I want though.