Use IPTables to reroute or just annoy your visitors

Yeah, I know, I’m an idiot.

So, what I wanted to do is to annoy one of my friends in a way he never observes I did something. He is a frequent visitor of one of the site’s I manage, as I couldn’t find a better way, I decided to do something with the site somehow. The site I couldn’t alter as it’s too popular. But I knew his IP from the logs so I decided to redirect him each time he tries to access the site.

Since php had the header() function disabled redirecting him via IP matching didn’t work, had to use something else. Meta refresh isn’t good, Javascript neither as he has it disabled all the time.

IPTables! Godly touch …


iptables -A PREROUTING -s HIS.IP.ADDRESS.01/255.255.255.0 -p tcp -j DNAT --to-destination 64.233.167.99


Every request from him to the server will forward him to Google search. Nice. The problem was, that I had to listen his theory of how Google bought his favorite site.

Why is this more effective than any other script-based method?
Well, that’s obvious why is better than the client-side methods, it can’t be overridden. As of why is better than the server side codes, a valid reason would be that if you simply can not use header resetting methods.

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