Anybody familiar with iptables? I've recently found that mine has gotten HUGE after running for several years unchecked, and it's causing major problems with the server.

I tried flushing it using:

# service iptables stop
# iptables -F

It ran for 30 minutes, then crashed the server and I had to reboot. When it came back up I ran:

# iptables -L

This appeared to start listing all of the data in order. After about 15 minutes it had gotten to 12.x.x.x, so I just used Ctrl+C to break out of it.

Any idea where the data is actually stored, and if I can delete it manually?


I read that I can configure it at:

# /etc/sysconfig/iptables

But that looks more like a data file than configuration, there's nothing in it that looks like parameters. Starting at around line 200, it mainly has about 40,000 lines that look like these:

-A CC_ALLOWF -s 123.45.0.0/15 -j RETURN 
-A DENYIN -s 987.65.43.21/32 ! -i lo -j DROP 

The last update was March 9, 2016 so this isn't where the blocked IPs are stored... I really don't know what it is.

Any suggestions on configuring the program so that it only stores data for 30 days? If not then I suspect I'll be right back to having problems in a year or two and not remembering how to fix it.