We’ll show you, how to set up a firewall with UFW on Ubuntu 16.04. If you have an Ubuntu server and you like to control the incoming and outgoing network traffic you need to configure the firewall that is included with your system. Linux kernel includes the netfilter subsystem which is a system for packet filtering. The traditional interface for manipulating netfilter is via iptables, which is primarily a database of firewall rules. The Uncomplicated Firewall or ufw is a frontend for iptables and it makes the iptables firewall configuration and blocking IP addresses much easier. In this guide, we will show you how to set up a firewall using UFW on a Linux VPS running Ubuntu 16.04 as an operating system.
Table of Contents
1. Install ufw
Before you start, you should make sure that ufw is installed and running on your server. If not, you can use the apt package manager to install it.
sudo apt-get install ufw
2. Enable ufw
To enable ufw, you can use the command below:
sudo ufw enable
3. Check the default configuration
Once enabled, ufw will be active and will start on system boot. Please note that all the incoming connections will be denied by default while the outgoing connections will be allowed. To check the default configuration, you can use the following command:
sudo ufw show raw
4. Allow connections to SSH
Since the incoming connections to your Ubuntu VPS are blocked by your firewall, nobody would be able to connect to it, including you. Therefore, you will need to allow connections to SSH.
sudo ufw allow ssh
or
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
where 22 is the port number where your SSH service is listening to.
5. Enable other services
Other services that may be enabled for incoming connections could be the following:
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp sudo ufw allow 443/tcp sudo ufw allow 21/tcp
6. Allow connections from specific IP addresses
Using ufw, you can allow connections from specific IP addresses too. For that purpose you can use the following command:
sudo ufw allow from 111.111.111.111
where 111.111.111.111 is the IP address you would like to allow connections from.
To check the status, enter the command:
sudo ufw status
To delete a rule, you can prefix the original rule with delete. For example, to delete the rule you previously created enter the following command:
sudo ufw delete allow from 111.111.111.111
7. How to disable uwf
In case you would like to disable ufw, you can use:
sudo ufw disable
For more usage commands you can use the --help flag:
sudo ufw --help
8. Most common uwf commands
The most commonly used ufw commands are the following:
enable enables the firewall disable disables the firewall default ARG set default policy logging LEVEL set logging to LEVEL allow ARGS add allow rule deny ARGS add deny rule reject ARGS add reject rule limit ARGS add limit rule delete RULE|NUM delete RULE insert NUM RULE insert RULE at NUM route RULE add route RULE route delete RULE|NUM delete route RULE route insert NUM RULE insert route RULE at NUM reload reload firewall reset reset firewall status show firewall status status numbered show firewall status as numbered list of RULES status verbose show verbose firewall status show ARG show firewall report version display version information Application profile commands: app list list application profiles app info PROFILE show information on PROFILE app update PROFILE update PROFILE app default ARG set default application policy
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Or simply install GUFW for a graphical frontend to ufw – “sudo apt install gufw”