Book Image

Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter

By : Lucian Gheorghe
Book Image

Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter

By: Lucian Gheorghe

Overview of this book

Firewalls are used to protect your network from the outside world. Using a Linux firewall, you can do a lot more than just filtering packets. This book shows you how to implement Linux firewalls and Quality of Service using practical examples from very small to very large networks. After giving us a background of network security, the book moves on to explain the basic technologies we will work with, namely netfilter, iproute2, NAT and l7-filter. These form the crux of building Linux firewalls and QOS. The later part of the book covers 5 real-world networks for which we design the security policies, build the firewall, setup the script, and verify our installation. Providing only necessary theoretical background, the book takes a practical approach, presenting case studies and plenty of illustrative examples.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, NAT, and L7-filter
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Prerequisites: netfilter and iproute2

The two things needed to build firewalls and Quality of Service (QoS) with Linux are two packages named netfilter and iproute. While netfilter is a packet filtering framework included in the Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6, iproute is a package containing a few utilities that allow Linux users to do advanced routing and traffic shaping.

This chapter is intended to introduce the tools we will use throughout this book. However, netfilter and iproute are very large subjects; so what I'll try to do in this chapter is to introduce readers who are not familiar with the subject, along with building a nice overview for readers who already know the subject.

There are two websites with a lot of documentation on both projects—for netfilter, http://www.netfilter.org, and for iproute, http://www.lartc.org.