Iptables as a Replacement for Commercial Enterprise Firewalls

Are you administrating a corporate network? How do you ensure securing your web services? There are many different solutions, but Iptables is one of the newer ones, and is up to the job.

With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program Iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.