Security: Firewalls; IPtables and Rules
The way that IPtables work is that you set up certain rules in each of these chains that control what happens to packets of data that pass through them. For instance, if your computer were to send out a packet to www.yahoo.com in order to request an HTML page, the packet would first pass through the OUTPUT chain. The kernel would look through the rules in the chain and see if any of them match. The first one that matches will decide the outcome of that packet. If none of the rules match, then the policy of the whole chain will be the final decision maker. Then whatever reply Yahoo! sends back will pass through the INPUT chain. It's no more complicated than that.
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