I'm following the book "Setting up LAMP" which suggests using an iptables script for configuring the firewall. I've gone through the procedure on both my dedicated servers. On one, it works like a charm. On the other, I see the correct rules when I first run "iptables -L" but after some brief amount of time, those rules seem to be reset and it's back to no firewall, as if I never ran the script adding the rules.

The only difference between the two is that I initially downloaded and installed apf to the computer that now doesn't work, but I did a "chkconfig apf off" and didn't explicitly start that service. (Doesn't show up on top.) Think there must be a simple explanation but I'm not getting it. Any suggestions? I tried "service iptables save" but that doesn't work.

check that apf's "debug" cron inst running

Thanks, that was it. The DEVM=1 flag was set in the apf script, so there was a cronjob flushing iptables every 5 minutes. Went through and deleted the various cronjob files from the cron directories. Am I correct in assuming there's no "uninstall" equivalent in Linux unless it's provided in a script, so the next best thing is just manually undoing the install script?