Just installed CentOS 7 on my Virtual machine and realized that, Firewalld is bit complicated as I am using iptables firewall from many years. So decided not to use firewalld at least as of now and wanted to continue with iptables commands as I was using in RHEL / CentOS 5 and 6.
I thought iptables will not be there and I will have to deal with firewalld but a little small trick in RHEL7 takes me to the solution which I wanted and I found that I can still use the iptables by disabling firewalld service.
So, If you are in same condition as mine and you want to use iptables on CentOS / RHEL 7 instead of firewalld, Please follow this howto.
As we all know that, CentOS / RHEL 7 both are completely systemd based, So We will have to use few systemd related commands to disable firewalld and enable iptables service.
1. Disable Firewalld Service.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl mask firewalld
2. Stop Firewalld Service.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl stop firewalld
3. Install iptables service related packages.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# yum -y install iptables-services
4. Make sure service starts at boot:
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl enable iptables
# If you do not want ip6tables, You can skip following command.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl enable ip6tables
5. Now, Finally Let’s start the iptables services.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl start iptables
# If you do not want ip6tables, You can skip following command.
[root@rhel-centos7-tejas-barot-linux ~]# systemctl start ip6tables
Firewalld Service is now disabled and stop, You can use iptables.
Now, You will be able to use iptables as your firewall, You can add / remove rules as you were doing in previous releases of Red Hat / CentOS 5 and 6, You can configure firewall with iptables in same manner as previous.
