I am revising the iptables rules that an IT company did for us (I just took over the IT department) and I had a real noob question for one of the rules.

What does ppp+ mean in an iptables rule?

iptables -A INPUT -i ppp+ -j ACCEPT

I am use to ipchains (good ol RedHat 6.2) and I have never seen this before. I am going to make sure I know everything and anything about iptables before I deploy a new set of rules and thoughrally test them before putting them into production.

Thanks for everyone's help. For a noob like me, I find LinuxQuestions.org to be the best so far!! Everyone has been very helpful.

Kevin

The '+' is just a wildcard operator used with the -i option. Take a look at the iptables man page for info (see the section on -i option) as well as here . Basically using 'ppp+' just matches all interfaces that contain the string "ppp" (ie ppp0, ppp1, etc)