From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Pablo Neira Ayuso Subject: Re: [PATCH] iptables: fix error reporting for missing/wrong arguments Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:01:51 +0200 Message-ID: <48F32A9F.1080402@netfilter.org> References: <48F25274.5090107@netfilter.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Netfilter Development Mailinglist , Patrick McHardy To: Jan Engelhardt Return-path: Received: from mail.us.es ([193.147.175.20]:41716 "EHLO us.es" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754558AbYJMLC2 (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:02:28 -0400 In-Reply-To: Sender: netfilter-devel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Jan Engelhardt wrote: > On Sunday 2008-10-12 15:39, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote: >> Some work to improve iptables error reporting would be nice, I'll see if >> I can have a look into this issue. > > Improve - in what way? There are a couple of nitpicking issues that I have observed during some training sessions, dummy users have the ability to trigger very confusing error messages from iptables, just one example: % iptables -I INPUT -m state --state NEW, ESTABLISHED ^ mind the small space triggers: iptables v1.4.2-rc1: Bad state `' Try `iptables -h' or 'iptables --help' for more information. Another example: if iptables returns EINVAL, it would be nice to add a string to say "Check your kernel log messages". Even if we don't have better error handling, at least we can be more informative. So, when I said *improve* I meant about hunting this sort of issues. -- "Los honestos son inadaptados sociales" -- Les Luthiers