Re: Performance question Drop or Reject

"Paul D. Robertson" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.security.firewalls.wizards
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, 15 Jan 2010, Paul Melson wrote:

> The difference between DROP and REJECT in iptables is that DROP simply
> discards the packet while REJECT discards the packet and sends an ICMP
> host-unreachable response to the source IP.  You can also configure TCP
> REJECT rules to respond with a TCP RST packet. There are several performance
> and security considerations that should be weighed when setting up your
> rules and deciding whether to DROP or REJECT.  

More properly, thaqt should be be an ICMP *destination* unreachable.  For 
TCP and UDP I'd expect to see code 3 (port unreachable) as the destination 
unreachable code (unless the source address is a broadcast or multicast 
address) although filters should give back code 9, 10 or 13.  Code 1 is 
host unreachable, and is generally only sent by routers.

Paul
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