How to Stop and Disable Firewalld on CentOS 7

A firewall is a complete solution that dynamically manages network connections and trust levels of interfaces. This gives you complete control over whether to allow traffic to the system or how to reject it..

Starting with CentOS 7, FirewallD replaces iptables as the default firewall management tool.

It is highly recommended to keep the FirewallD service enabled, but in some cases such as testing, you may need to stop or disable it completely.

 Here we will show you how to disable firewall on CentOS 7 system through this tutorial.

Prerequisites

Before starting with the tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privilege..

If you are disabling the firewall because you are experiencing connectivity issues or you have troubles configuring your firewall please check this guide on How to setup a firewall with firewall with firewalld on centos 7 .

Check the Firewall Status

To view the current status of the FirewallD service you can use the firewall-cmd command:

sudo firewall-cmd --state

If the FirewallD service is running on your CentOS system the command above will print the following message:

running

Disable Firewall

You can temporarily stop the FirewallD service with the following command:

sudo systemctl stop firewalld

However this change will be valid for the current runtime session only.

To permanently disable the firewall on your CentOS 7 system, follow the steps below:

1. First, stop the FirewallD service with:sudo systemctl stop firewalld
2. Disable the FirewallD service to start automatically on system boot:sudo systemctl disable firewalldThe output from the command above will look something like this:Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/firewalld.service. Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.fedoraproject.FirewallD1.service.
3. Mask the FirewallD service which will prevent the firewall from being started by other services:sudo systemctl mask --now firewalldAs you can see from the output the mask command simply creates a from the firewalld service to /dev/null:Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/firewalld.service to /dev/null.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to stop and permanently disable the firewall on a CentOS 7 machine.

If you have any questions or remarks, please leave a comment below.