Question: I'm running a Linux server that - from time to time - faces heavy load and the conntrack table overflows. Since it's iptables firewall ruleset is very simple I'd like to turn it to stateless mode. I know that iptables can operate in stateful connection tracking mode and in a stateless mode.

My firewall rules are all in place I'm pretty sure that they are stateless but my question is how can I verify that the firewall is really operating in stateless mode?

Answer: 
You need to specify some iptables rules to prevent packets to be conntracked :

```
iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -j NOTRACK
iptables -t raw -I OUTPUT -j NOTRACK

```
Install [conntrack](http://linux.die.net/man/8/conntrack), and look at the output. I am pretty sure if you are stateless no connections will be displayed.