John...
The logging method that iptables uses is a standard logging mechanism that
provides the ability for the logs that come out of it to be read by standard log
parsers. The standard is used by many web, ftp, etc. servers that I know of.
A provision was made a while back for user space logging
I've set up a basic firewall using iptables. It allows connections from
a block of ip addresses to port 22, and allows connection back from
established,related. Then everything else gets dropped. Out of
curriousity mostly, I wanted to log everything that gets dropped, but
iptables logs an overwh