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.
