RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 : Disable Firewalld and use iptables

Hello,

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.

Firewall

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-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl mask firewalld

2. Stop Firewalld Service.

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl stop firewalld

3. Install iptables service related packages.

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# yum -y install iptables-services

4. Make sure service starts at boot:

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl enable iptables

# If you do not want ip6tables, You can skip following command.

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl enable ip6tables

5. Now, Finally Let’s start the iptables services.

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl start iptables

# If you do not want ip6tables, You can skip following command.

[root@rhel-centos7-vikram-linux ~]# systemctl start ip6tables

Firewalld Service is now disabled and stop, You can use iptables.