iptables-persistent not uninstalling

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 and I simply want to uninstall iptables-persistent to test something.

As suggested here (http://www.installion.co.uk/ubuntu/saucy/universe/i/iptables-persistent/uninstall.html) I tried:

sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove iptables-persistent

... but it's still there. I tried again and got the message:

Package 'iptables-persistent' is not installed, so not removed

But it isn't removed. I rebooted and still am able to run

/etc/init.d/iptables-persistent save

and /etc/init.d/iptables-persistent is still there. What am I missing? Shouldn't that file be gone after removing it as I did?

Solution

Files in /etc are config files and are kept around when you remove a package in case you reinstall it in the future. If you want to get rid of them, you have to purge the package:

sudo apt-get remove --purge iptables-persistent

Comments

[Eaten by a Grue]

thanks. what exactly is the purpose of this package? I added a rule to iptables to ban an ip and it worked. after reboot the rule was gone. Isn't this supposed to keep rules after reboot?

[Alexander Karatarakis]

Very late, but since I am looking into this anyway... iptables-persistent snapshots the rules at installation time. If you alter edit your rules, you have to manually update the files in /etc/iptables/