I’ve been trying to log iptables to a file. from my understanding its suppose to log to kern.log or messages but that doesn’t seem to be happening. when using the Digital Ocean console when inputting ‘iptables -A INPUT -j LOG’ it’ll start logging the NIC but outputs it to the console not to kern.log or messages. even adding ‘kern.warning /var/log/iptables.log’ to rsyslog yields the same results. What am I doing wrong or how can I monitor traffic and log to file as this is how I was monitoring traffic and rejecting IPs via fail2ban and log files with regular expressions but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Hi @ace31585,
Usually you should be able to see all messages in your journal:
journalctl
Having said that, as far as I know this is not something that can be reviewed anytime except real time.
As mentioned you’ve added kern.warning /var/log/iptables.log to rsyslog. Can you by any chance try and add it at /etc/syslog.conf and see if that would work for you?
Additionally, most probably you’ve tried this but can you give the bellow a try
iptables -N LOGGING
iptables -A OUTPUT -j LOGGING
iptables -A LOGGING -m limit --limit 2/min -j LOG --log-prefix "IPTables-Rules Dropped: " --log-level 4
iptables -A LOGGING -j DROP
This will output messages to /var/log/messages (unless you’ve specified it somewhere else from your syslog conf) with the prefix "IPTables-Rules Dropped: "
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