Ip tables chain forward policy accept or drop which is recommended?

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

I am in the process of configuring IP tables using this tutorial The purpose of the server is installing wordpress blog.

I am not sure about chain forward some on some tutorial i see it being dropped and on the others i see it not being addressed. I have dropped input chain and allowed output. What to do with the forward chain ? So what is better accept or drop it ?

1 Answer

The FORWARD chain of table filter is used only when your computer needs to send incoming packets to another machine (in other words forward them...).

This happens only when your server acts as router, hosts VMs or docker containers that need network access and don't have bridged adapter, etc...

Generally speaking if you don't have any rules defined for the FORWARD chain, then it's likely safe to just drop it.

However because of it's position in the netfilter packet flow there isn't much benefit in dropping the FORWARD chain - there won't be any significant performance boosts. This is probably why some tutorials leave it unaddressed.