Iptables are empty at boot or on reload

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

My Iptables are completely empty at boot, and fw3 reload does not attempt to flush or load them.
if I call iptables -L, then fw3 reload, they are loaded. but only the default table: nat, mangle ect. must also be called with iptables -L {table}, to get fw3 reload to fill them.

This has me stumped, I can't really think of where to look for the problem here, This happens right after install so I have not changed anything in settings, nothing shows up in error logs.
I'm new to Linux Containers, so I'm not sure if that could be the problem, but everything else seems to be working fine, other configuration settings are loaded, installing packages, etc.

I have not tried 18.04, as I've read the 19 snapshots work better in lxc, but I might try that too.

OpenWrt SNAPSHOT, r11219-34c4741da0 in an LXC container on x86-64 hardware

2

What is the contents of "/etc/config/firewall"?
What happens if you execute "/etc/init.d/firewall"?

3 
# kick iptables, so firewall will start 
ip6tables -L
iptables -L

echo "Restarting Firewall"
# clear and restart firewall
/etc/init.d/firewall restart

# show result
#ip6tables -L


# insert NAT44 iptables rule, firewall fails to insert this rule
WAN=$(uci get network.wan.ifname)
if [ $(uci get firewall.@zone[1].masq) -eq 1 ]; then
    echo "Enabling IPv4 NAT"
   /usr/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $WAN -j MASQUERADE
fi

echo "Pau!"

I just found this at the bottom of init script meant for openwrt running in a container, so it looks like I'm not the only one that's run into this, the info I had said this script was no longer needed in the v19 snapshots, so I didn't pay much attention to it until now when I started trying to get v18 to work.

For now, I have the iptables -L -t comands run at boot in a script like this one, seems to be working.
thanks for trying to help @eduperez :smiley: