how to restore iptables after iptables -F?

I used iptables -F on my machine, and what can I do to recover the iptables into the default without rebooting my machine?

I restarted the iptables service and it failed, and I can't find iptables under /etc/sysconfig/iptables

2 Answers

The iptables-restore command is used to restore the iptables rule-set that was saved with the iptables-save command. It takes all the input from standard input and can't load from files as of writing this, unfortunately. This is the command syntax for iptables-restore:

iptables-restore [-c] [-n]

More details here

Your system is probably using firewalld, so you'll probably want to run systemctl restart firewalld.