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

```
`cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack` shows all connection tracking.

So, if it's stateless, the output of the above command should be empty.

(Alternatively, use `cat /proc/net/nf_conntrack`)