Comment by lclarkmichalek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lclarkmichalek | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    ipfwadm - pre 1996 (I think?)
    ipchains - pre 1998 according to wikipedia
    iptables - 1998 according to wikipedia
    nftables - 2014

More churn than javascript frameworks.

Realistically iptables isn't going anywhere, though I'm def looking forward to nftables being more widely used. My main interest is around the newer setups and advanced networking, but if you're not dealing with one of them, then you 1) probably won't have to port anything to nftables this decade, and 2) could probably get away with using a higher level tool like UFW

Plus, current iptables runs on top of nftables, doesn't it?

iptables the kernel component might run on top of netfilter (i.e. there are various `nf_` modules loaded in my kernel, some of which are being used by `iptables_` modules), though I doubt iptables the user space component relies on ntf/nftables the user space component. Could be wrong I guess (comment and I shall edit this out if I'm wrong)

As an aside, that's one of the nice things about nftables. No more conflating the user space binary, the user space format, the kernel module and so on.

My understanding is that iptables and nftables are both user interfaces to configure rule-sets in the NetFilter code, though I think that glosses over some important bits.

> More churn than javascript frameworks.

4 in 20 years. No.

I believe the poster you are replying to meant that with a touch of sarcasm.

Blatant sarcasm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com