How to Stop and Disable Firewall on CentOS 8

A firewall is a security feature that filters incoming and outgoing traffic and keeps at bay potentially malicious applications. Additionally, a firewall gives the systems administrator the authority to determine which services and ports to allow and which ones to block or disallow. In this tutorial, you will learn how to stop and disable the firewall on CentOS 8.

On Linux, there are many firewall systems. The most commonly used firewalls are 'Firewalld' and 'Iptables'.  Firewalld is a front-end dynamic firewall management service made available by default on both CentOS and Fedora servers. Firewalld is a powerful firewall management service and has now replaced Iptables. It manages both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

Let's see how we can stop and disable the firewall on CentOS 8.

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How to Disable The Firewall On Windows Server Core 2016 How to Stop and Disable Firewalld

It's usually not a good idea to have your firewall turned off or disabled. However, some applications may not work as intended with the firewall being active and this may compel you to temporarily stop or disable it.

For users using CentOS 8/RHEL 8, and Fedora 20 and later versions, follow the procedure below to stop and disable Firewalld.

1) How to check the status of Firewalld

Login to your server via SSH and run the command below to verify or check the status of your firewall.

# systemctl status firewalld

sample output

From the output above, we can evidently see that Firewalld is up and running. Let's now see how we can stop the firewall.

2) How to Stop Firewalld

To stop the firewall, issue the below command:

# systemctl stop firewalld

sample output

3) How to disable Firewalld

Finally, to disable the firewall on boot, run the command:

# systemctl disable firewalld

sample output

Having disabled the firewall, we need to verify that the firewall is indeed disabled. Again, to check the status of firewalld, issue the command:

# systemctl status firewalld

sample output

Great! We have now established that the Firewall has been stopped and disabled.

Conclusion

It's always recommended to have your firewall active at all time to keep unwanted services and traffic at bay. This way, you will safeguard your system from possible threats and attacks. Always remember to turn your Firewall back after disabling it.