How to persist iptables configuration on Amazon EC2 VPC NAT Ami? [duplicate]
Debian (and derivatives) use the iptables-persistent package for this task.
Define your rules in /etc/iptables/rules.4 and/or /etc/iptables/rules.6 and activate the service (using update-rc.d, chkconfig or your tool of choice.
On RHEL and derivatives, the startup script /etc/init.d/iptables reads /etc/sysconfig/iptables, so you need to define your rules there, and ensure that the iptables service is activated (chkconfig iptables on) and started (service iptables start).
service iptables save
or
/etc/init.d/iptables save