About Zones and Services

Firewall security is implemented through the concepts of zones and services.

Zones are predefined sets of filtering rules that correspond to levels of trust for network access. You can add to the default filtering rules of a zone by reconfiguring the zone's settings and therefore refine the zone's control of traffic flow. When you install Oracle Linux, a default zone called public is automatically assigned to the system.

Firewall rules are applied through services that are assigned to a zone. The service ports are the access points of network traffic. Services assigned to a zone automatically have their ports opened to receive and send network packets.

For more information about zones and firewall-related services, see the firewalld.zone(5) and the firewalld.service(5) manual pages.

Displaying Information About Zones

When you configure the firewall for zones, displaying the current zone and service settings and other information as part of the configuration steps is a good practice. With this approach you can monitor the changes you're introducing to the firewall and identify potential errors that would make the changes invalid.

To display the system's default zone, run the following command:

firewall-cmd --get-default

List all the predefined zones that are included in the installation as follows:

firewall-cmd --get-zones

block dmz drop external home internal public trusted work

You can configure any zone in the list. As you change settings of a particular zone, that zone becomes an active zone. To identify the active zone, type the following:

firewall-cmd --get-active-zone

Note:

By default, all configurations are implemented on the default zone. Note also that an active zone isn't necessarily the default zone. Therefore, you must specify the zone name in the command to define settings for that specific zone. Otherwise, the definitions are applied to the default zone.

Displaying Zone Settings

To obtain the settings of a zone:

sudo firewall-cmd --list-all [--zone=zonename]

Without specifying a zone, the command displays the settings of the default zone. Thus, to list the settings of the work zone, you would use the following command;

sudo firewall-cmd --list-all --zone=work

work
  target: default
  icmp-block-inversion: no
  interfaces: 
  sources: 
  services: cockpit dhcpv6-client ssh
  ports: 
  protocols: 
  forward: yes
  masquerade: no
  forward-ports: 
  source-ports: 
  icmp-blocks: 
  rich rules: