<story><title>New in Debian stable Stretch: nftables</title><url>http://ral-arturo.org/2017/05/05/debian-stretch-stable-nftables.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arca_vorago</author><text>Quite a few advantages to nftables. I have been advocating for people to start learning it now instead of later. One of the primary issues I have seen in systems from a sysadmin perspective is poorly configured iptables. I disagree with all the abstractions that make it &amp;quot;easier&amp;quot; but result in more misconfigs. Besides improvements I expect to filter back over to linux from the dragonfly bsd netstack, nftables is one of the biggest moves in a while. Next up, routing engines like Cjdns, but that&amp;#x27;s a different discussion.&lt;p&gt;From the nftables wikipedia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...iptables firewalling code, which has protocol awareness built-in so deeply into the logic that the code has had to be replicated four times—for IPv4, IPv6, ARP, and Ethernet bridging—as the firewall engines are too protocol-specific to be used in a generic manner.[10]&lt;p&gt;The main advantages of nftables over iptables are the simplification of the Linux kernel ABI, reduction of code duplication, improved error reporting, and more efficient execution, storage and incremental changes of filtering rules. Traditionally used iptables(8), ip6tables(8), arptables(8) and ebtables(8) (for IPv4, IPv6, ARP and Ethernet bridging, respectively) are intended to be replaced with nft(8) as a single unified implementation, providing firewall configuration on top of the in-kernel virtual machine.&lt;p&gt;nftables also offers an improved userspace API that allows atomic replacements of one or more firewall rules within a single Netlink transaction. That speeds up firewall configuration changes for setups having large rulesets; it can also help in avoiding race conditions while the rule changes are being executed. Also, a planned compatibility layer is going to provide translation of already existing iptables firewall rules into their nftables equivalents.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>click170</author><text>I use and recommend nftables, and while it&amp;#x27;s very usable I also think it&amp;#x27;s important to acknowledge that nftables is not yet at &lt;i&gt;full&lt;/i&gt; feature parity with iptables.&lt;p&gt;More details can be found here:&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.nftables.org&amp;#x2F;wiki-nftables&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;Supported_features_compared_to_xtables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.nftables.org&amp;#x2F;wiki-nftables&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;Supported_...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.nftables.org&amp;#x2F;wiki-nftables&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;List_of_updates_since_Linux_kernel_3.13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.nftables.org&amp;#x2F;wiki-nftables&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;List_of_up...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All the basics are there and I&amp;#x27;m already using it for my home firewall so don&amp;#x27;t get the wrong idea, but if you use any of the more interesting iptables features you might want to test those features out in nft before committing yourself to it. Your kernel version is key.&lt;p&gt;Also, let me extend a Thank You to everyone who&amp;#x27;s worked to make nftables a reality! My favorite parts are atomic ruleset replacement and the ability to do &amp;#x27;log and drop&amp;#x27; in one rule.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Added link to actual feature comparison</text></comment>
<story><title>New in Debian stable Stretch: nftables</title><url>http://ral-arturo.org/2017/05/05/debian-stretch-stable-nftables.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arca_vorago</author><text>Quite a few advantages to nftables. I have been advocating for people to start learning it now instead of later. One of the primary issues I have seen in systems from a sysadmin perspective is poorly configured iptables. I disagree with all the abstractions that make it &amp;quot;easier&amp;quot; but result in more misconfigs. Besides improvements I expect to filter back over to linux from the dragonfly bsd netstack, nftables is one of the biggest moves in a while. Next up, routing engines like Cjdns, but that&amp;#x27;s a different discussion.&lt;p&gt;From the nftables wikipedia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...iptables firewalling code, which has protocol awareness built-in so deeply into the logic that the code has had to be replicated four times—for IPv4, IPv6, ARP, and Ethernet bridging—as the firewall engines are too protocol-specific to be used in a generic manner.[10]&lt;p&gt;The main advantages of nftables over iptables are the simplification of the Linux kernel ABI, reduction of code duplication, improved error reporting, and more efficient execution, storage and incremental changes of filtering rules. Traditionally used iptables(8), ip6tables(8), arptables(8) and ebtables(8) (for IPv4, IPv6, ARP and Ethernet bridging, respectively) are intended to be replaced with nft(8) as a single unified implementation, providing firewall configuration on top of the in-kernel virtual machine.&lt;p&gt;nftables also offers an improved userspace API that allows atomic replacements of one or more firewall rules within a single Netlink transaction. That speeds up firewall configuration changes for setups having large rulesets; it can also help in avoiding race conditions while the rule changes are being executed. Also, a planned compatibility layer is going to provide translation of already existing iptables firewall rules into their nftables equivalents.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joosters</author><text>These are all very kernel-orientated improvements. My guess is that a &amp;#x27;common&amp;#x27; user (whatever that may be), cares very little about the efficiency or improved storage benefits of a new firewall command.&lt;p&gt;As for users with poorly configured iptables, fair enough but the latest and greatest new firewall toolset will give ample opportunity to create new poorly configured nftables too.&lt;p&gt;This is all coming from a bitter old sysadmin who has had to re-tool through ipfwadm, ipchains and iptables, and who knows what else in the coming future. I&amp;#x27;m sure each iteration has brought improvements to newer setups and advanced networking, but this smells like just another &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s re-write some tools&amp;quot; project.</text></comment>