Linux iptables Pocket Reference: Firewalls, NAT & Accounting

Concise and very handy. Guides like these aren't meant to be a complete reference on iptables. Yet, the author managed to pack quite a bit into such a small book. 82pages from page 1 to beginning of index.21 pages to theory and operation -- connection tracking, accounting, NAT, SNAT, DNAT, Transparent Proxying, load balancing, and stateless/stateful firewalls.The next 61 pages are a command reference to iptables. It is in the command reference that you shall find interesting little nuggets like:1) How to rate limit incoming traffic. Specific examples provide for allowing only 10 pings per second.2) How to setup IP pools to match source and/or destination addresses. Instead of writing a line for each IP or netblock, throw the addresses into a pool and write a line for each pool.3) How to match multiple ports on the same line.and so on.Worth every penny. Lives up to O'Reilly name. Would recommend for every Linux sysadmin.

Last year, I was forced to become a fly-by-night system administrator. I worked for a small, local startup as its web developer, but was thrust into a sysadmin role when my boss decided to host a website on a server in our office. I was developing the site on our Ubuntu server, but was learning how to secure the server on the fly. This reference, out of all the other books I read and sites I visited, had the most bang for the buck.It's short and sweet. It describes what you should know, and gives you a reference for dealing with iptables syntax, and that's it. No flowery text, no colored pictures. Just simple "This is how to do X."If you're a sysadmin, especially if you're just getting your feet wet, get this book. It's cheap, it tells you what you need to know, and it fits in your pocket. What's not to like?

Very good overview of iptables. Works nicely as a command reference, giving more detail than the man pages but not bogging the reader down with too much filler. Would not be ideal for someone new to iptables.

Decent reference, provides some details not found even in some popular books.

I needed this book to get started to iptables, to make a research for a term paper.What I liked the most is that it has really lots of information (very good variety of matches and targets), but I really disliked the facts that:It doesn't detail how to structure an iptables command (step by step at least).it explains the matches and targets in the same section, kind of a mixture of both, fact that completely puzzled me.It organizes the explanation in alphabetical order, criteria that I thing is the worst to organize technical topics.It is useful if you already understand iptables, but if you are a freshman, you really need to get more information sources.

Nicely quick reference to the awesome linux routing tables configuration utility.

Presents the confusing iptables daemon in easy-to-understand terms. If you have ever "man iptables" and got confused as hell, this book is the opposite of that feeling. No, it won't teach you TCP/IP, but it will teach you how to use the protocol to block / monitor / transform / shape / etc etc.Solid buy.

I had a pretty solid working knowledge of iptables before I bought this book. However, there were holes in that knowledge that needing filling. Further, it would be nice to have a quick reference to find out how to use the most commonly used commands in iptables. This book filled that niche very nicely. Strongly recommended for the system admins needing to improve their firewalls.

As described

Good value for the price. This book contains detailed information for all the possibilities you have with Iptables.

I'm writing this in March 2023, and by this time, the book is very outdated, with regards to the version of iptables, missing more recent features.Aside from that, like most O'Reilly books, it is very well-written and informative. The areas that are still relevant are easy to digest and helpful, and for someone in the beginner to moderate levels of netfilter, they provide a very handy reference work.

It is compact, and can be very quickly read to get a background to IPTables.As others have suggested, the most common use for IPTables is to create firewalls, but it also has far more sophisticated uses in channelling traffic through different routes (NATing, level 3 traffic routing, etc.). While the book was very useful in providing general pointers to what is possible, its compact size means there is not much room to go into much detail about all the exotic scenarios that IPTables could be used for.

Das Buch liefert einen guten Überblick über die Funktionen und Möglichen welche iptables bereitstellt. Zusätzlich gibt es eine kurze theoretische Einführung, wie packets vom Linux-Kernel verarbeitet werden und ermöglicht so einen besseres Arbeiten mit iptables.Aus meiner Sicht eine lohnende Investition für jeden der mit Netzwerken zutun hat.