Recommended Way Of Handling Iptables Firewall In CentOS?

Hi,

I’m planning to use CentOS 6.x on a handful of LAN servers. So far I’ve been using Slackware64 14.0 and 14.1 for the job.

I wonder what’s the orthodox/recommended way of configuring and iptables firewall with CentOS. I understand there’s the system-config-securitylevel-tui NCurses interface which allows defining a basic set of rules. But what about the handful of more advanced rules I have to configure?

Here’s an example of an /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall script that I might use with Slackware. It contains mostly basic rules, and a couple of more advanced rules, one to limit SSH access, the other one to redirect HTTP
traffic to Squid.

If I want to copy my actual firewall configuration to CentOS, what would be the recommended way? I started from a bare bones minimal CentOS 6.5
installation, so system-config-securitylevel-tui is not even installed. Is it a good idea to try to configure /etc/sysconfig/iptables by hand?
What do you suggest?

Cheers,

Niki