Talk:Advanced Protection Firewall

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I tried using the information in this article, but it did not help. The problem was that apf did not run on my server. It seems to be a problem with source in bash script files. Other people have reported similar problems with the Gutsy Gibbon release:

 [1] ubuntu Forums: bash's source is not working in Gusty [sic]

In any case, all I was trying to do was enable the HTTPS port (443) for my Apache2 server.

Before encountering this problem I did not know much about Netfilter or iptables. But because apf is a front-end for iptables commands, I decided to try the iptables route directly. It wasn't as complicated as I had feared.

It turns out that Ubuntu has a nice How-To for iptables that made the process easy:

 [2] ubuntu Community Docs: IPTables HowTo

A simple iptables one-liner was all I needed:

 iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

So, if you experience problems with apf like I did, you might want to explore this approach.

IMPORTANT NOTE: APF upgrade sets DEVEL_MODE by default

If you get Superb techs to upgrade APF for your server, make sure you immediately test your existing rules with the new version and then set DEVEL_MODE="0" in /etc/apf/conf.apf.