I have Debian running device that needs to act as an internet-gateway. On top of that I want to provide a firewall that not only blocks inbound traffic, but also outbound traffic. And I figured iptables should be able to do the job. The problem: I've configured NAT properly (I think?), but once I set the default policy to DROP and add rules to for instance allow HTTP traffic from inside the LAN, HTTP is not going through. So basically my rules don't seem to work. Below is the initialization script that I use for iptables. The device has two NICs, respectively eth0 (the WAN interface) and eth1 (the LAN interface). echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # Flush tables iptables -F iptables -t nat -F # Set policies iptables -P INPUT DROP iptables -P OUTPUT DROP # NAT iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT # Allow outbound HTTP from LAN? iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT Can anyone shed some light on this?