Bugzilla Bug 139726

the current (1.3.5-r1) stable version of iptables has an issue with error
message not reporting correctly.

when you do have an iptables error you get this message:

iptables: Unknown error 4294967295

This is a known issue that has been fixed in the devel version of iptables
according to danieldg - one of the iptables developers I talked to on the
#iptables channel of freenode.

There is also a patch that is available that will fix the error message problem
without waiting for the devel version to be marked stable.

daniel gave me this command to get the patch:

svn diff -r 6587:6588 https://svn.netfilter.org/netfilter/trunk/iptables

rather than keep the information to myself, I figured the thing to do would be
to make the info public and ask the gentoo devel team to take a look at making
this patch part of the current stable iptables ebuild.

also according to daniel, its an easy fix/simple mistake, the errno was being
overwritten.

Hoping we can have real error messages in iptables sooner rather than later.

added to iptables-1.3.5-r3.

Thanks for the pointers to the patch.