iptables: log and drop

Linux has a sohpisticated firewall built right into the kernel: It’s called iptables! I’m pretty sure you heard about it. You can do realy crazy things with iptables. But here I just want to log how to log+drop a packet in a single rule.

Usually, you would probably do something like that:

iptables -A INPUT -j LOG --log-level warning --log-prefix "INPUT-DROP:"
iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

Works perfectly, but dramatically messes your rules table up.. Especially, if you want to log+drop packets that match a complicated filter. You’ll end up with twice as many table entries as desired..

The trick is to instead create a new rule chain that will log+drop in sequence:

iptables -N LOG_DROP

So here I created a new chain called LOG_DROP. We can now append (-A) two new rules to that chain, which do the actual drop+log:

iptables -A LOG_DROP -j LOG --log-level warning --log-prefix "INPUT-DROP:"
iptables -A LOG_DROP -j DROP

(similar like the first code above, just not for the INPUT chain but for the LOG_DROP chain)

That’s basically it! If you now need to log+drop a packet you can append a new rule to e.g. the INPUT chain that routes the packet to the LOG_DROP chain:

iptables -A INPUT [...filter specification...] -j LOG_DROP

You should consider to limit the number of redundant log entries per time to prevent flooding of your logs.. For more documentation you should consult the manual of iptables(8).