koddo's questions

I wanted to figure out why, after a etckeeper commit, I had a problem with rebooting (already solved thanks to this great thing).

I played with etckeeper, did git checkout some_commit_sha for a quick look and then git checkout master.

And it seems my file permissions in /etc were broken after those manipulations. All files including ssh_host_rsa_key passwd-, shadow- were rw-r--r--. I didn't know Git does not save file permissions.

Now I fixed all of them (I hope I didn't miss anything).

What was the right way to get earlier states of /etc, look around, and go back to the master with the right file permissions?

I found masquerading made simple howto very useful and everything works just fine. But I'm not sure about the last line:

iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! ppp0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP   #only if the first two are succesful
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -o ppp0 -j REJECT

There is no explanation in the howto. Why is that for?

I guess it's to reject outside-to-inside traffic, but how it works? Maybe it's better to write -i ppp0 -o eth0 (where eth0 is my local network interface)?