The Singapore Linux July Meetup

Hi all,

For July, we are privileged to have Jeff come talk to us about iptables. Come hear an explanation of what you can do with iptables and the commands to do it. Jeff will make you folks get up and physically "walk through" how packets interact with the rules and what happens. So it's certainly not boring (well, at least that's what he assures me):

** ABOUT THE SPEAKER ***
Jeff Jansen has worked for SIL (that's pronounced as letters - S. I. L.) International as a sysadmin since the mid 1990's. Before that he was a campus pastor at two universities in the States. He's been using linux since 1999 when he complained loudly to a former college roommate about all the troubles he was having using Windows 9X Internet Connecting Sharing. His friend sent him a copy of Redhat with the note attached "This will change your life!". His friend was right!

He and his family (wife Elizabeth and 2 boys, plus a baby girl as of June 18!) spent the last 10 years with SIL in West Africa and just arrived in Singapore this year. He's been exclusively a linux sysdamin since 2002 when a civil war forced him and his coworkers to evacuate their homes and the SIL office, leaving the computers running behind them. The windows machines didn't last long. The linux server only died when the roof caved in on it (which did eventually happen).

** ABOUT HIS TALK ***
iptables' is the linux firewall tool in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel. It's incredibly powerful, but that power comes with a dizzying array of options and somewhat confusing syntax. We'll take a general look at some of the more common things you can do with it (stateful packet inspection, use NAT to connect an internal network to the internet, routing control, etc.) as well as look at the iptables commands you use to actually do these things. In the end you should be able to use the iptables command line to write your own general firewall as well understand )at least somewhat) what's going on when you read someone else's iptables firewall.

warmest regards,
Darrel