Monitoring, Management & Location Tracking

When the iptable service starts it ends up with the following error message:

FATAL: Module ip_tables not found.
'ptables-restore v1.4.7: iptables-restore: unable to initialize table 'filter

Error occurred at line: 1

The way the single-quote that ought to follow the word filter has migrated itself back to the start of the line makes me very suspicious that the rules file contains spurious ^M characters at the ends of lines, and that iptables is actually complaining that it can't initialise table 'filter^M' - which it most certainly can't, there being no such table.

This non-printing (and thus hard to see) ^M would have come from the first line of the file you quote above, if it was in fact *filter^M.

The easiest way to be sure is to edit the file with vi in binary mode, vi -b /etc/sysconfig/iptables (I'm assuming that's the file you're quoting above), and look for non-printing characters that shouldn't be there and remove them and save the file.

Then restart the iptables to resolve the issue.

[root@airwave mercury]# service iptables restart
iptables: Flushing firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: nat filter      [  OK  ]
iptables: Unloading modules:                               [  OK  ]
iptables: Applying firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
[root@airwave mercury]#