"Iptables Tutorial 1.2.2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Andreasson Oskar)

Chapter 2. TCP/IP repetition

Iptables is an extremely knowledge intensive tool. This means that iptables takes quite a bit of knowledge to be able to use iptables to it's full extent. Among other things, you must have a very good understanding of the TCP/IP protocol.

This chapter aims at explaining the pure "must understands" of TCP/IP before you can go on and work with iptables. Among the things we will go through are the IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP protocols and their headers, and general usages of each of these protocols and how they correlate to each other. Iptables works inside Internet and Transport layers, and because of that, this chapter will focus mainly on those layers as well.

Iptables is also able to work on higher layers, such as the Application layer. However, it was not built for this task, and should not be used for that kind of usage. I will explain more about this in the IP filtering introduction chapter.