just for the record, these commands worked in the end :-) thanks to all that helped. nmap still shows the port open, but I guess this is good enough. iptables -A INPUT -s 127.0.0.1 -d 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport 5680 -i lo -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -d 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport 5680 -j DROP -- http://www.josswinn.org