A very quick one! I’ve been playing with iptables rules lately and was wondering: “How do I debug these things?”. How can I know if the rule is matching what I want, or if it’s doing something at all? I found one way to do so, and it’s probably not the only one (or the best one), but I thought I’d share it anyway. Feel free to send me your tips and tricks!

Using the LOG action and optionally specifying a custom log prefix, it’s relatively easy to see what packets are targeted by a rule. For example:

iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -j LOG --log-prefix='[netfilter] '

Will then write logs into /var/log/kern.log, which you can monitor using tail:

tail -f /var/log/kern.log

I found this to be pretty convenient!