Re: [qubes-users] nftables vs iptables
On 10/9/18 11:44 AM, mfreemon wrote: On 10/8/18 10:56 AM, mfreemon wrote: On 10/2/18 2:25 AM, Ivan Mitev wrote: On 10/2/18 1:32 AM, Chris Laprise wrote: On 10/01/2018 05:48 PM, mfreemon wrote: On 1/11/18 3:01 PM, Chris Laprise wrote: > On 01/10/2018 03:47 PM, Connor Page wrote: >> The official templates use nftables so shouldn’t be mixed with iptables. I didn’t have time to learn about nftables, so just removed nftables package from debian 9 template. YMMV. > > Hmmm, I was just thinking how Qubes' own guest scripts still use > iptables even in fedora-26. > > IIUC, iptables and nft are two different interfaces to netfilter. I > don't know if it really matters, at least for the R4.0 window. I'd > prefer to put the syntax change (for docs) off until a later release. I was recently thrown by the mix of both nftables and iptables in R4. The qubes docs don't clarify much. The qubes firewall scripts use nft. Most of the discussion on the qubes website documentation is about iptables, but there are also a few mentions of nft. The upgrade instructions (going from R3.2 to R4) did not mention converting rules from iptables to nftables. It looks like other related projects (one example is qubes-tunnel) is using iptables. Just reading a few things and trying to come up to speed, I get the impression that nftables and iptables should not both by used at the same time. Even if technically possible (i.e. both sets of rules applied correctly), it strikes me as not a great idea to maintain packet filtering rules in two different ways. What is the best practice recommendation on this (for R4, Fedora 28 template)? Are we to be using, exclusively, nftables in R4? The last I read about this (for 4.0) is that nftables is used in Fedora Qubes code, but Debian Qubes is still using iptables. That still appears to be the case since nftables is not installed in my debian-9 templates. I've submitted qubes-tunnel to Qubes with iptables commands only, with the intention to transition to nftables (or that other new interface in Linux, name escapes me just now) for Qubes 4.1. Someone who is just starting a project might be better off going with nftables. ... until yet another packet filtering mechanism replaces nftables (in that case, bpfilter [1]). I understand the rationale behind using nftables [2] but given how it is widespread (hint: close to 0 even amongst seasoned sysadmins) IMHO it wasn't worth it. The OP's post confirms there's quite some confusion about how it interacts with iptables, and the official documentation is far from helpful. I'm quite proficient with iptables and networking in general but it took me half an hour to understand how to tweak Qubes' nftables rules last time I wanted to change something in the firewall, while I would have done that task in less than one minute with iptables. I could have spent a few hours learning nftables to improve the official doc but at my age I prefer to spend time learning tech that significantly improves things (eg. Qubes OS over standard linux distribution) over loosing time learning stuff that is only marginally better. Anyway - I digress :) [1] https://old.lwn.net/Articles/747551/ [2] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1815#issuecomment-245109500 I'm concerned about the confusion and unnecessary complexity here. Network packet filtering is certainly (one of) those features that software such Qubes needs to be solid on (in both design approach and implementation detail). Is the Qubes team confident in the current situation, such that users of Qubes should not be concerned? nb. This is not meant to be a criticism at all. I very much appreciate the hard (and complicated) work going into Qubes. I'm just looking to understand the current situation better so as to judge whether my concern is warranted or not. As an example: I'm wanting to enable some specific network traffic between two qubes. The docs say to use iptables (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/firewall/#enabling-networking-between-two-qubes). qubes-firewall-user-script also specifies iptables rules. But qvm-firewall implements the rules it manages using nftables. So the firewall VMs have both iptables rules and nftables rules in effect. And these are different sets of rules. It's not that the iptables command and the nft command are just two user interfaces showing the same packet filtering rules. They are different packet filtering rules. This seems like a receipt for disaster. Is this the wrong forum for this discussion? Should this be on qubes-devel, or an issue in qubes-issues at https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues? s/receipt/recipe/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post
Re: [qubes-users] nftables vs iptables
On 10/8/18 10:56 AM, mfreemon wrote: On 10/2/18 2:25 AM, Ivan Mitev wrote: On 10/2/18 1:32 AM, Chris Laprise wrote: On 10/01/2018 05:48 PM, mfreemon wrote: On 1/11/18 3:01 PM, Chris Laprise wrote: > On 01/10/2018 03:47 PM, Connor Page wrote: >> The official templates use nftables so shouldn’t be mixed with iptables. I didn’t have time to learn about nftables, so just removed nftables package from debian 9 template. YMMV. > > Hmmm, I was just thinking how Qubes' own guest scripts still use > iptables even in fedora-26. > > IIUC, iptables and nft are two different interfaces to netfilter. I > don't know if it really matters, at least for the R4.0 window. I'd > prefer to put the syntax change (for docs) off until a later release. I was recently thrown by the mix of both nftables and iptables in R4. The qubes docs don't clarify much. The qubes firewall scripts use nft. Most of the discussion on the qubes website documentation is about iptables, but there are also a few mentions of nft. The upgrade instructions (going from R3.2 to R4) did not mention converting rules from iptables to nftables. It looks like other related projects (one example is qubes-tunnel) is using iptables. Just reading a few things and trying to come up to speed, I get the impression that nftables and iptables should not both by used at the same time. Even if technically possible (i.e. both sets of rules applied correctly), it strikes me as not a great idea to maintain packet filtering rules in two different ways. What is the best practice recommendation on this (for R4, Fedora 28 template)? Are we to be using, exclusively, nftables in R4? The last I read about this (for 4.0) is that nftables is used in Fedora Qubes code, but Debian Qubes is still using iptables. That still appears to be the case since nftables is not installed in my debian-9 templates. I've submitted qubes-tunnel to Qubes with iptables commands only, with the intention to transition to nftables (or that other new interface in Linux, name escapes me just now) for Qubes 4.1. Someone who is just starting a project might be better off going with nftables. ... until yet another packet filtering mechanism replaces nftables (in that case, bpfilter [1]). I understand the rationale behind using nftables [2] but given how it is widespread (hint: close to 0 even amongst seasoned sysadmins) IMHO it wasn't worth it. The OP's post confirms there's quite some confusion about how it interacts with iptables, and the official documentation is far from helpful. I'm quite proficient with iptables and networking in general but it took me half an hour to understand how to tweak Qubes' nftables rules last time I wanted to change something in the firewall, while I would have done that task in less than one minute with iptables. I could have spent a few hours learning nftables to improve the official doc but at my age I prefer to spend time learning tech that significantly improves things (eg. Qubes OS over standard linux distribution) over loosing time learning stuff that is only marginally better. Anyway - I digress :) [1] https://old.lwn.net/Articles/747551/ [2] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1815#issuecomment-245109500 I'm concerned about the confusion and unnecessary complexity here. Network packet filtering is certainly (one of) those features that software such Qubes needs to be solid on (in both design approach and implementation detail). Is the Qubes team confident in the current situation, such that users of Qubes should not be concerned? nb. This is not meant to be a criticism at all. I very much appreciate the hard (and complicated) work going into Qubes. I'm just looking to understand the current situation better so as to judge whether my concern is warranted or not. As an example: I'm wanting to enable some specific network traffic between two qubes. The docs say to use iptables (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/firewall/#enabling-networking-between-two-qubes). qubes-firewall-user-script also specifies iptables rules. But qvm-firewall implements the rules it manages using nftables. So the firewall VMs have both iptables rules and nftables rules in effect. And these are different sets of rules. It's not that the iptables command and the nft command are just two user interfaces showing the same packet filtering rules. They are different packet filtering rules. This seems like a receipt for disaster. Is this the wrong forum for this discussion? Should this be on qubes-devel, or an issue in qubes-issues at https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view
Re: [qubes-users] nftables vs iptables
On 10/2/18 2:25 AM, Ivan Mitev wrote: On 10/2/18 1:32 AM, Chris Laprise wrote: On 10/01/2018 05:48 PM, mfreemon wrote: On 1/11/18 3:01 PM, Chris Laprise wrote: > On 01/10/2018 03:47 PM, Connor Page wrote: >> The official templates use nftables so shouldn’t be mixed with iptables. I didn’t have time to learn about nftables, so just removed nftables package from debian 9 template. YMMV. > > Hmmm, I was just thinking how Qubes' own guest scripts still use > iptables even in fedora-26. > > IIUC, iptables and nft are two different interfaces to netfilter. I > don't know if it really matters, at least for the R4.0 window. I'd > prefer to put the syntax change (for docs) off until a later release. I was recently thrown by the mix of both nftables and iptables in R4. The qubes docs don't clarify much. The qubes firewall scripts use nft. Most of the discussion on the qubes website documentation is about iptables, but there are also a few mentions of nft. The upgrade instructions (going from R3.2 to R4) did not mention converting rules from iptables to nftables. It looks like other related projects (one example is qubes-tunnel) is using iptables. Just reading a few things and trying to come up to speed, I get the impression that nftables and iptables should not both by used at the same time. Even if technically possible (i.e. both sets of rules applied correctly), it strikes me as not a great idea to maintain packet filtering rules in two different ways. What is the best practice recommendation on this (for R4, Fedora 28 template)? Are we to be using, exclusively, nftables in R4? The last I read about this (for 4.0) is that nftables is used in Fedora Qubes code, but Debian Qubes is still using iptables. That still appears to be the case since nftables is not installed in my debian-9 templates. I've submitted qubes-tunnel to Qubes with iptables commands only, with the intention to transition to nftables (or that other new interface in Linux, name escapes me just now) for Qubes 4.1. Someone who is just starting a project might be better off going with nftables. ... until yet another packet filtering mechanism replaces nftables (in that case, bpfilter [1]). I understand the rationale behind using nftables [2] but given how it is widespread (hint: close to 0 even amongst seasoned sysadmins) IMHO it wasn't worth it. The OP's post confirms there's quite some confusion about how it interacts with iptables, and the official documentation is far from helpful. I'm quite proficient with iptables and networking in general but it took me half an hour to understand how to tweak Qubes' nftables rules last time I wanted to change something in the firewall, while I would have done that task in less than one minute with iptables. I could have spent a few hours learning nftables to improve the official doc but at my age I prefer to spend time learning tech that significantly improves things (eg. Qubes OS over standard linux distribution) over loosing time learning stuff that is only marginally better. Anyway - I digress :) [1] https://old.lwn.net/Articles/747551/ [2] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1815#issuecomment-245109500 I'm concerned about the confusion and unnecessary complexity here. Network packet filtering is certainly (one of) those features that software such Qubes needs to be solid on (in both design approach and implementation detail). Is the Qubes team confident in the current situation, such that users of Qubes should not be concerned? nb. This is not meant to be a criticism at all. I very much appreciate the hard (and complicated) work going into Qubes. I'm just looking to understand the current situation better so as to judge whether my concern is warranted or not. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/730fa03d-d105-ab76-6297-21039ebb584a%40zoho.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[qubes-users] nftables vs iptables
On 1/11/18 3:01 PM, Chris Laprise wrote: > On 01/10/2018 03:47 PM, Connor Page wrote: >> The official templates use nftables so shouldn’t be mixed with iptables. I didn’t have time to learn about nftables, so just removed nftables package from debian 9 template. YMMV. >> > > Hmmm, I was just thinking how Qubes' own guest scripts still use > iptables even in fedora-26. > > IIUC, iptables and nft are two different interfaces to netfilter. I > don't know if it really matters, at least for the R4.0 window. I'd > prefer to put the syntax change (for docs) off until a later release. I was recently thrown by the mix of both nftables and iptables in R4. The qubes docs don't clarify much. The qubes firewall scripts use nft. Most of the discussion on the qubes website documentation is about iptables, but there are also a few mentions of nft. The upgrade instructions (going from R3.2 to R4) did not mention converting rules from iptables to nftables. It looks like other related projects (one example is qubes-tunnel) is using iptables. Just reading a few things and trying to come up to speed, I get the impression that nftables and iptables should not both by used at the same time. Even if technically possible (i.e. both sets of rules applied correctly), it strikes me as not a great idea to maintain packet filtering rules in two different ways. What is the best practice recommendation on this (for R4, Fedora 28 template)? Are we to be using, exclusively, nftables in R4? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/15321f4d-255d-23ac-2283-90571bee996e%40zoho.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
