Where does netfilter-persistent save the iptables rules?

Question

Been looking where does netfilter-persistent store its rules but could not find any documentation about it on help.ubuntu.com.

Does anybody know where does netfilter-persistent in Ubuntu save its rules so it survives a reboot?

score 28 · Accepted Answer · answered May 12 '17 at 05:11

28

Found it only works if you install 'iptables-persistent' package as well.

sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent netfilter-persistent

It will be saved in /etc/iptables/rules.v[4-6]

If you only install netfilter-persistent, it wont save any configuration

answered May 12 '17 at 05:11

ignivs

396

oh, that's why! Thanks for pointing that out. :) – chrone May 12 '17 at 08:54
3

Actually, just sudo apt install iptables-persistent is enough. It will install netfilter-persistent as dependency automatically. – ruuter Mar 18 '20 at 12:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 25 '22 at 13:39

Ignivs' answer is perfect. However, I want to complement it a little.

In man netfilter-persistent, it says "All plugins are stored in /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d". Part of /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d/15-ip4tables reads

save_rules()
{
    if [ ! "${IPTABLES_SKIP_SAVE}x" = "yesx" ]; then
        touch /etc/iptables/rules.v4
        chmod 0640 /etc/iptables/rules.v4
        iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4
    fi
}

Then we know that the rules are actually saved by iptables-save and stored in /etc/iptables/rules.v4.

Where does netfilter-persistent save the iptables rules?

2 Answers2

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