13 engineers on Hacker News describe using iptables first-hand: 2 endorse it, 1 regret it, 1 are mixed.
“I never liked iptables, but nftables is pretty nice to write and use.”
regret · production · guerby · 2025-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd rather just deal with iptables and linux directly without the wonky cli.”
endorse · personal · bastard_op · 2023-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“configure it to disable the docker-proxy and IPTables manipulation and manage IPTables yourself... you'll have far more control.”
endorse · production · alias_neo · 2021-06-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“such as busted busybox/iptables support. Compiling these two packages against amd64 allow them to run, which is totally fine.”
mixed · production · 1 yr · KyleSanderson · 2013-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My mitigation for this lack of patches has been using iptables.”
neutral · personal · superkuh · 2026-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I make a bridge for Docker to use and configure iptables rules myself via parallel config management.”
neutral · production · akerl_ · 2026-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I did disable a major (and I do mean MAJOR) system for 20 minutes by misconfiguring an IP tables entry in Prod.”
neutral · production · slowhand09 · 2023-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One time a bad config push took out a couple hundred webservers with effectively a single iptables default deny rule”
neutral · production · lamontcg · 2023-03-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run the VM in its own network namespace on the host... We then use an iptable rule to rewrite every incoming and outgoing packet”
neutral · production · CompuIves · 2022-09-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“No thanks I can do the NAT myself with iptables on a cheaper EC2 instance.”
neutral · production · Galanwe · 2020-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Haproxy isn't quite as fast as iptables (we switched because of this)”
neutral · production · sillysaurusx · 2020-07-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run iptables and an api we wrote on our ingest servers.”
neutral · production · wesleytodd · 2016-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“fencing network traffic at the iptables layer to help protect GlusterFS clients from hanging talking to down nodes”
neutral · production · syrneus · 2014-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?