Use IPtables or null route for blacklisting about 1 million IP addresses?

Posted by tylerl on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by tylerl
Published on 2011-11-25T22:31:24Z Indexed on 2011/11/26 1:54 UTC
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iptables

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route

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blacklist

I've come across a situation where a client needs to blacklist a set of just under 1 million individual IP addresses (no subnets), and network performance is a concern. While I would conjecture that IPTables rules would have less of a performance impact than routes, that's just conjecture.

Does anyone have any solid evidence or other justification for favoring either IPTables or null routing as solution for blacklisting long lists of IP addresses? In this case everything is automated, so ease-of-use isn't really a concern.

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