Set Linux Firewall Rules for a Range of IP Addresses using Webmin
December 8, 2011 Leave a Comment
Network address ranges are set slightly differently to standard wildcards. For example, to describe a range of IP addresses from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.255.255 you use:
192.168.0.0/16
Where 16 describes the number of bits in the IP address that are used for comparison. In this case the 16 describes the first 2 bytes of the address: 192.168. You can read more about IP addressing at Rhyshaden’s Data Network Resource (and various other places).
To set your linux firewall up in webmin to use a range of IP addresses, just use the wildcard notation above. So in Webmin – Networking – Linux Firewall, when you are editing a rule in iptables you can put in 192.168.0.0/16 to describe a range of IPs (e.g. in the “source address or network” field to restrict access to a certain IP range). Manually setting these rules is more tricky but there are resources out there like Linux Home Networking and the Easy Firewall Generator to help. We just used Webmin as it makes this kind of work very easy indeed.
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