ipf stopped working on 5.3

[Darren Reed]

In some mail from ray at redshift.com, sie said:
> 
> At 01:12 PM 10/26/2005 -0400, John Fitzgerald wrote:
> | Another strange symptom is that if I ipf -D and then ipf -E -f
> | /etc/ipf.rules, my terminal (I'm remote) will freeze and I'll be forced to
> | power cycle the server, after which time it will come back up (with no rules
> | running). I'm assuming that after the ipf -E -f /etc/ipf.rules somehow the
> | firewall stops all traffic since apache won't respond to web requests
> | either.
> | 
> | As a side note, I did put the sshd server listening on an obscure port so it
> | should take awhile for the bots to find it. The ipf.rules I left at 22 as a
> | testament to it not working. However this obviously isn't a permanent
> | solution as I should be able to get ipf working.
> 
> after you make changes to ipf.rules, you should restart ipf like this:
> 
> ipf -F a && ipf -f /etc/ipf.rules

many do it like this:

# test new rules for 30 seconds
ipf -If /etc/ipf.rules -s && sleep 30 && ipf -s

The '-I' tells ipf to load /etc/ipf.rules into the "inactive set"
of rules and "-s" says switch active set.

You can flush inactive rules too:
ipf -iFa

and dump them out:
ipfstat -Iio

(IPFilter pioneered this idea)

Darren