Managing Firewalld on CentOS/RHEL 7 – start/stop/status-check

Hey, I’m new here and unable to manage my Firewall daemon on my server/VPS. The OS is reloaded with latest CentOS 7.

Yeah, it’s a little bit new, managing services on CentOS/RHEL 7 servers. The daemon for iptables is firewalld and it’s not listed under the directory, /etc/init.d. But we can simply manage this feature from the location/script “/bin/systemctl.” Here I’m explaining the commands to manage, which includes start/stop/status for the firewall daemon on the CentOS 7 server.

We already discussed about the basics of Iptables in linux. We can call, it’s the basics of Firewall for Linux. Iptables is a rule based firewall system and it is normally pre-installed on a Unix operating system which is controlling the incoming and outgoing packets. By-default the iptables is running without any rules, we can create, add, edit rules into it.For more details, please check this tutorial >> What is iptables in Linux <<

These instructions are intended specifically for managing firewalld CentOS/RHEL 7.

How to start Firewalld service on CentOS 7 server?

When I execute the default command, I’m getting the following error:

[root@crybit ~]# service iptables start
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start  iptables.service
Failed to issue method call: Unit iptables.service failed to load: No such file or directory.

Here is the solution. Please do follow the commands pasted below to manage Firewalld on your latest CentOS 7 servers.

To start Firewalld

systemctl start firewalld

To enable Firewalld

Which means, to ensure firewalld starts automatically at system start, enter the following command as root:

systemctl enable firewalld

To stop Firewalld

systemctl stop firewalld

To disable Firewalld

Which means, to prevent firewalld from starting automatically at system start, issue the following command as root:

systemctl disable firewalld

Okay, then, how to check the status of Firewalld on a server?

Yeah, this is also simple. Please log into the server as root and issue the following command:

systemctl status firewalld

That’s it!!

See the sample output:

[root@crybit ~]# systemctl status firewalld
firewalld.service - firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/firewalld.service; disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2016-04-05 09:58:01 EDT; 23min ago
 Main PID: 2915 (firewalld)
   CGroup: /system.slice/firewalld.service
           └─2915 /usr/bin/python -Es /usr/sbin/firewalld --nofork --nopid

Apr 05 09:58:01 host.crybit.com systemd[1]: Started firewalld - dynamic firewall daemon.