I'm trying to bone up on netfilter, iptables, conntrack etc etc.

Using the howto at:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Iptables_and_stateful_firewalls#Firewall_design_basics

Early on after describing how to generate a netfilter enabled kernel,
the author has this to say:

"If you've already rebooted and are using your new netfilter-enabled
kernel, you can view a list of active network connections that your
machine is participating in by typing

 "cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack"

Even with no firewall configured, Linux's conntrack functionality is
working behind the scenes, keeping track of the connections that your
machine is participating in"

That file is not present on my setup. I'm guessing it may have been
renamed since the howto was written... maybe to `nf_conntrack'. But in
the files listed in /proc/net... I don't see the behavior described.

Maybe someone can tell me what has changed or what is missing...

ls /proc/net:

arp           ip_tables_matches netlink         ptype
softnet_stat
arp_tables_matches ip_tables_names   netstat         raw
stat
arp_tables_names   ip_tables_targets nf_conntrack      route
tcp
arp_tables_targets ipt_hashlimit    nf_conntrack_expect rt_acct
udp
dev           ipt_recent      packet          rt_cache
udplite
dev_mcast       mcfilter       pnp            snmp
unix
igmp           netfilter       protocols        sockstat

--
gentoo-user@(protected)