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Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

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Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#41

This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…

Was it this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aNetfilter-packet-flow.s...

I use this all the time when writing iptable rules.

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#44
post #31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more of a netfilter (the thing behind iptables and nftables) diagram rather than just iptables. If you know how iptables maps to that diagram you are very likely to be able to quickly understand how nftables does too.

Sure, but we really shouldn’t be encouraging the use of iptables in 2025.

That's not realalistic for most of the Linux world.

Soooo many systems are still using iptables even though we "should" be using nft everywhere.

If you're going to be a Linux Sys/Net Admin today, you need an understanding of both systems.

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if there is a English version of the book?

If the author agrees, I could try to learn Serbo-Croatian (I'm Polish, good with languages) and translate it to English. I'm kinda a burnout Linux geek, who cannot look at computers much more. Translating a book would be fun, but I would need some sponsoring. Amadeusz at [the old name of icloud].com

You may want to find an email provider that has a better spam filter if you want people to actually contact you.

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#46
post #44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but we really shouldn’t be encouraging the use of iptables in 2025.

That's not realalistic for most of the Linux world. Soooo many systems are still using iptables even though we "should" be using nft everywhere. If you're going to be a Linux Sys/Net Admin today, you need an understanding of both systems.

If someone doesn’t know iptables, they probably are not required to know it. You wouldn’t recommend people to learn C++03, would you?

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#48

This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…

Was it this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aNetfilter-packet-flow.s...

This also isn't complete because it doesn't show code between or around the various tables. I used to think of iptables as dumb filters that manipulate raw packets before/after the rest of the kernel sees them, but this view is wrong, and doesn't explain, for example, how it does NAT.

And the answer is it doesn't do NAT. The code is already preparing to do NAT, and that code merely consults the table to find out what kind of NAT it should do. The diagram makes it look like you can just move a NAT rule to a filter or mangle rule because the kernel just applies these tables in sequence anyway, but you can't because they are consulted by different blocks of code for different purposes.

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#49

This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…

> I failed to use IP tables for years.

Me too, then I discovered FreeBSD and pf tables. I _feel_ like an expert network engineer now. It took time and effort of course, but the learning process "clicked" for me all along the way and I was able to build on my understandings. Give it a try!

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/firewalls/

There was a recent book published on the tool, The Book of PF, 4th Edition

Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

#50
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was put pretty well by describing things as accidental complexity (of which you want as little as possible) and essential complexity, which is inherent to the problem domain that you're working with and which there is no way around for. The same thing could sometimes fall into different categories as well - like going for a microservices architecture when you need to serve about 10'000 clients in total vs…

> inherent to the problem domain that you're working with and which there is no way around for I'd phrase it to reasonable taken trade-offs for customer/user support and/or selling products. > going for a microservices architecture when you need to serve about 10'000 clients So far I am only aware of the use case to ship/release fast at cost of technical debt (non-synchronized master) of microservices. As I understan…

1. When you have a system where each component has significant complexity, to the point where if it was a monolith you'd have a 1M SLoC codebase that would be slow to work with - slow to compile, slow to deploy, slow to launch and would eat a lot of resources. At that point chances are that the business domain is so large that splitting up into smaller pieces wouldn't be out of the question.

2. Sometimes when you have vastly different workloads, like a bunch of parts of the system (maybe even the majority) that is just a CRUD and a small part that needs to deal with message queues, or digitally sign documents, or generate reports or do any PDF/Word/Excel/whatever processing. You could do this with a modular monolith but sometimes it's better to keep the dependencies of your project clean, especially in the case of subpar libraries that you have to use, so you at least can put all of the bullshit in one place. Also applies in cases where the load/stability of that one eccentric part is under question.

3. The tech stack might also differ a whole bunch of some of those use cases, for example if you need to process all sorts of binary data formats (e.g. satellite data) or do specific kinds of number crunching, or interact with LLMs, a lot of the time Python will be a really good solution for this, while that's not what you might be using in your stack throughout. So you might pick the right tool for the job and keep it as a separate service.

4. The good old org chart, sometimes you'll just have different teams with different approaches and will be working on different parts of the business domain - you already said that, but Conway's law is very much a thing that'd be silly to fight against all that much, because then you'd end up with an awkward monorepo, the tooling to make working which easy might just not be available to you.

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