Firewalls

Firewalls are set-up primarily to filter and/or enhance packets which pass through the network. When a packet arrives at a firewall, it will either disregard or process the packet. The network device of a firewall only disregards packets which are invalid in some network-technical way. We won’t get into the details of which packets are disregarded automatically, but consider these disregarded packets malformed in some way. The most important thing is: The rest is being processed!! Here’s where firewalls really kick in.
Iptables is such a firewall, and a very powerfull one! It handles packets based on the type of packet activity, and enqueues the packet in one of its builtin ‘tables’. There are three tables in total.
The first is the mangle table which is responsible for the alteration of service bits in the TCP header. This is hardly used in basic setups (at home or in SOHO).
The second table is the filter queue which is responsible for packet filtering. It has three built-in chains in which you can place your firewall policy rules. Continue reading →