I learned a new trick yesterday. It all started when a rogue service on some of my RHEL servers would start even though it was configured not to start. The rogue service was iptables. I don't need iptables running on my servers since they don't talk to the web, so after initial installation I turn it off using the command: chkconfig iptables off & chkconfig ip6tables off.
This works pretty good most of the time. Except for where I work, we are very prone to finding bugs if they exist.
So I begin my investigation.
First things first, can I duplicate the issue? Yes. Every reboot.
Ok, now to find out why. I pull an sosreport from the server. Copy it to my Windows 7 laptop.
My goal is to review pretty much every config file in the report looking for references to iptables.
This is starting to look nasty... This means I need to open each file in an editor of some sort.
Well this is where I learned a new trick. I opened up notepad++. Not paying attention to what I was doing, instead of dragging a single file or a group of files to the editor, I grabbed a folder, /etc/ in this case and dragged it to notepad++.
Oops, well, let's see what happens.
Notepad++ did something unexpected, but very much to my liking, it opened each of the files in the folder. It was great, hit cntl+f to search and search each file for iptables.
A few instances found, not what I was looking for. So I continued to do so with each folder... I was pleased with Notepad++'s ability to open each file in the folder.
It was great and sped up my work considerably. I still don't know why iptables continues to start at each boot, but oh well, I opened a case with Red Hat to get that issue solved, still working with them to get an answer.
I will post an update once the issue is resolved. I am sure that Red Hat if anyone can solve this weird issue for me.
