Networking & Firewall (Ss/Netstat/Iptables/Nftables/Curl)

Stop tearing your hair out over silent packet drops

🧩 The Challenge

You finally pinpointed that your service isn’t reachable, but your logs are totally clean and the firewall seems to be doing nothing. I’ve spent whole afternoons tracing traffic only to find a single drop rule I forgot existed deep in the stack.

💡 The Fix

Just peek at your nftables counter stats to see which rules are actually catching your traffic. It shows you exactly where the packets are getting nuked without having to guess.

nft list ruleset -a

⚙️ Why It Works

Adding the -a flag lets you see the handles and the packet counts for each rule. If you watch those counters increment while you fire requests at the server, you’ll know instantly which rule is acting like a black hole.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Use the handle numbers to delete that specific broken rule without flushing your entire chain.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 9/3/2026