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FWIW I never understood UFW over straight IP tables, is it really easier to read?

IMHO, yes. At least on Ubuntu, it's never been too clear to me how I should save my rules so that they come back on startup.

The ufw man page is pretty decent.

I've not tried anything complex with UFW so I still use iptables on my bastion host that handles my vpn tap. It's not terribly complex to make rules come back on startup (but probably more involved than one would hope).

For anyone else that followed the thread to this point- this advice on bringing iptables back up on reboot worked for me http://rackerhacker.com/2009/11/16/automatically-loading-ipt... YMMV

This is how I run iptables on a sufficiently large network of machines.

The advice is not complete. IPv6 is real and really works most of the time these days. Back up your ip6tables to a file too. I like /etc/firewall-4.conf and /etc/firewall-6.conf but it's down to preference.

Know about iptables-apply too, lest you be caught unaware.

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