[CentOS] Recommended way of handling iptables firewall in CentOS?

Mon Oct 13 09:01:33 UTC 2014
Niki Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr>

Hi,

I'm planning to use CentOS 6.x on a handful of LAN servers. So far I've 
been using Slackware64 14.0 and 14.1 for the job.

I wonder what's the orthodox/recommended way of configuring and iptables 
firewall with CentOS. I understand there's the 
system-config-securitylevel-tui NCurses interface which allows defining 
a basic set of rules. But what about the handful of more advanced rules 
I have to configure?

Here's an example of an /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall script that I might use 
with Slackware. It contains mostly basic rules, and a couple of more 
advanced rules, one to limit SSH access, the other one to redirect HTTP 
traffic to Squid.

If I want to copy my actual firewall configuration to CentOS, what would 
be the recommended way? I started from a bare bones minimal CentOS 6.5 
installation, so system-config-securitylevel-tui is not even installed. 
Is it a good idea to try to configure /etc/sysconfig/iptables by hand? 
What do you suggest?

Cheers,

Niki
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