Firewall

By Bryanpwo

You can simply install GUFW, which stands for Graphical Uncomplicated Firewall. It is a personal firewall with a graphical settings menu that is easy to use.

It is recommended to not use UFW anymore nowadays firewalld is a way more versatile tool to manage your security. See here on how to use and set it up:

FirewallD

Make sure your system is up to date before installing it. So just enter

sudo pacman -Syu

to make sure it is updated, then install needed packages :

sudo pacman -S gufw

Even though we provide the graphical settings app for UFW, I will show you the command line settings to help you understand UFW better.

You can put these settings in the graphical app also.

After installation UFW isn’t enabled by default, so the first step is to enable the firewall with this command:

sudo systemctl start ufw.service

Now you’ve enabled the firewall for this session. I’m going to give you some basic settings.

UFW and in general all firewall tools use “rules” to enable or disable package arrive/receive to any computer.so by default, you must allow any outgoing traffic to be streamed and reject any incoming traffic by:

sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw default deny incoming

Adding rules

Rules can be added in two ways: By denoting the port number or by using the service name.

For example, to allow both incoming and outgoing connections on port 22 for SSH, you can run:

sudo ufw allow ssh

or:

sudo ufw allow 22

and these are other samples:

sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow http/tcp
sudo ufw allow 1725/udp
sudo ufw allow 1725/udp
sudo ufw allow from 123.45.67.89/24
sudo ufw allow from 123.45.67.89 to any port 22 proto tcp

Removing rules

To remove a rule, add delete before the rule implementation. If you no longer wish to allow HTTP traffic, you could run:

sudo ufw delete allow 22

You can check the status of UFW at any time with the command: sudo ufw status. This will show a list of all rules, and whether or not UFW is active:

Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22                         ALLOW       Anywhere
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
443                        ALLOW       Anywhere
22 (v6)                    ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
443 (v6)                   ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Now you’re almost ready, the last step you have to do is to enable firewall with every boot by typing this command:

sudo systemctl enable ufw.service

GUI interface

If you prefer a GUI interface for your settings you can use the graphical app GUFW which only needs to get installed:

sudo pacman -S gufw

and enable the firewall service:

systemctl enable --now ufw.service

This will enable and start the needed firewall service.

Now you can start the GUI and start or stop the firewall on your needs: