Subject: Re: netfilter spurious ELOOP

From: Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:07:36 +0100

David Miller wrote:
> From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
> Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:02:05 +0100
> 
> Adding correct CC:'s
> 
>> summary: iptables command gets spurious ELOOP errors
>>
>> report: when a rule with a target like MARK --set-mark 0x80000001
>> then adding new other rules can failed with "Too many levels of symbolic
>> links" (aka ELOOP) error.
>> The problem is in kernel net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_tables.c in the 
>> mark_source_chains() routine which checks the verdict field of
>> targets even for not standard targets.
>>
>> keywords: netfilter target eloop
>>
>> environment: recent gentoo and fedora. Problem not fixed in
>> linux-2.6.29 (last stable version taken from kernel.org some minutes ago).

Just to clarify: does the problem happens when you have the MARK rule
above in a user-defined chain that has more then one jump leading to
it or does it also happen in other cases?