Block or allow IP large IP pools of countries using ipset.

Simply because ipset is just designed for it.

Just take a look at below picture. You can clearly see that using only iptables is a pain for your system.

The purpose of ipsetfw is for automation. You just give it a yaml file, setup a cronjob and go watch a movie or something.

It works like this:

Takes a list of IPs, either via fetching from github with country code you provided, or a list of IP networks you passed to the binary.

After that, it will create a ipset set, and if you choose, it will also add the required iptable rule for it.

Next time you run the same command, it will clear everything and start again from scratch. So, it will:

• Take an IP list
• Create setand add IPs to it
• Setup iptable rules (optional)
• Repeat

There are two ways of using ipsetfw, either you pass arguments to cli which is a bit limited, or give it a yaml file for more option.

You can use ipsetfw -help to see options and example of usage.

Create a set of Iran IP pool and block IPs from Iran by adding iptables rule:

ipsetfw -country IR -set set -iptables -policy drop

Fetch github and export Iran IP pool:

ipsetfw -country ir -export -file /tmp/list-export.txt -v

Create a set of Iran IP pool and accpet IPs from Iran from file:

ipsetfw -country IR -set set -iptables -policy accept -file /tmp/list-export.txt

You can use a yaml config file with more options. Here's an example:

defaultChain: IPSET_FW

rules:
  - country: ir
    set: ir-block
    iptables:
      policy: drop
      insert: 1

  - file:
    - /tmp/US-list.txt
    - /tmp/DE-list.txt
    country: us
    set: us-block
    iptables:
      policy: drop
      insert: 2
      chain: "IPSET_FW"
      table: "filter"

As you can see, you can only give country code to fetch list of IPs from github.

Or you can pass your own files to ipsetfw to create a set with multiple countries, or even add your own IPs.

You can completely ignore iptables section. This way, ipsetfw will not take care of iptable rules for you.

If you want to clear everything setup by config file, just run:

ipsetfw -config ipsetfw.yml -clear -v