The program 'iptables' is currently not installed

Question

I am a newbie, so my apologies up front.

I am trying to get DansGuardian installed (which I believe I have) and working. To get it working I need to filter IP traffic through the app via iptables. There are appropriate commands in the 'Getting DansGuardian working on Ubuntu' page. My issue is that the system is telling me that iptables is not currently installed - which is wrong. I understand that it is the primary firewall service for Ubuntu.

I have tried:

xyzzy@ubuntu:/usr/sbin$ iptables

The program 'iptables' is currently not installed.  
You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install iptables

So:

sudo apt-get install iptables
Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

iptables is already the newest version.

The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:

  thunderbird-globalmenu

Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 342 not upgraded.

Only to be told that the version I am running is the latest.

ufw is running.

Answer 1

Credit to kraxor's comment on the original question:

You should try reinstalling iptables by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install iptables

Answer 2

try these one by one

sudo apt-get remove iptables

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install iptables

it should work now.

Answer 3

Use following command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent

and it will install the iptables-persistent package for you.