Disabling the flood of kernel messages in Debian console

To disable permanently all low level kernel messages (iptables etc.) from flooding the console in Debian do the following changes:
(you must be root for these changes)

To make the changes permanent:
Edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf
add the following line:

kernel.printk = 4 1 1 7

The above changes will be effective at reboot or immediately using the following command:

/sbin/sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

To make the changes only temporarily

echo "4 1 1 7" > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

and you can check the setting with

cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk