IPTables Cluster Script

I have been working on some interesting virtualized networking setups (More on this in another post soon) and needed a way to configure IPTables rules on all nodes which are to be considered part of a cluster (HA) setup. What I wanted was the ability to take a rule or a set of rules and apply them to any number of nodes so they were all consistent and the rules to be saved and not have to login to each node individually. Now I know that I can do this with an automated solution (Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Salt) but I instead wanted to do this using a very simple shell script. So here is what I came up with and it works perfectly therefore I wanted to share this in the odd chance that maybe someone else may benefit from it as well.

If you do not want to be prompted each time for a password when running the script (SSH login prompts) you should setup passwordless ssh sessions between your servers and the central server that you plan on running the script from. The account used to execute the script will also need to be root or have sudo permissions.

ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id remote-user@hostname

Now we need to create the following files.

sudo nano /opt/nodes.txt

Add all of the nodes that you would like to be part of your cluster and save the file.

sudo nano /opt/iptables_cluster.sh

Now paste the following code into this file and save it.

Now make the script executable

sudo chmod +x /opt/iptables_cluster.sh

Now you are ready to deploy out your IPTables rule(s) to all of your nodes. When you run the script it will prompt for you to enter the rule or rules that you would like to apply. You can copy and paste your rules or type them all out. You will need to enter the rules exactly as you would from the CLI and then type done and press enter on the very last line of your rules.

/opt/iptables_cluster.sh

Below is what you will see when executing the script.

Now just enter your rule or rules like below and type done and enter at the end. (If you are using sudo instead of root you will need to prepend the iptables rules with sudo)

And off you go. I will be adding more functionality to this as time goes on but for now this is what I was needing.

Enjoy!