Product: 0596005695

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.
Rating: 4
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