Firewalls Management

Your Firewalls area is under the Security drop down menu in the Cloud Control Panel. Here you can view your currently configured and setup Firewall Profiles, as well as create new Firewall Profiles.

Cloud Control Firewall Location Image

For more information on how to access your Cloud Control area, please review Cloud Control Overview.

Firewall Profiles are firewall settings above the instance and allow for ease of firewall settings and configurations. You can apply them to one, many or even all of your instances with Hostwinds.

Hostwinds Firewall Example Image

Firewall Profiles provide a container for virtual firewall rules that control ingress (inbound to instances) and egress (outbound from instances) network traffic at the port level.

By default, they use a deny policy and only contain rules that allow specific traffic. Each port can reference one or more Firewall Profiles in an additive fashion. The firewall driver translates security group rules to a configuration for underlying packet filtering technology, such as iptables.

Firewall Profiles List

The listed Firewall Profiles will display the name of the group and a short description of the group.

You can edit the description by selecting the Actions dropdown and selecting Edit.

The actions drop-down on the Cloud Instance Firewall page

Displaying Settings of Firewall Profiles

Pressing the + sign next to the name of a security group will expand the group to display the group’s configurations.

The display will provide the description, direction, protocol, IP type, Min and Max Ports

firewall cloud portal

Adding Firewall Profiles

Pressing the Create button to review a drop-down

Select Firewalls from the Create button drop-down to create a new Firewall

Create Firewall Button Image

The prompt will request the name of the profile and a short description of the group you’re creating.

Add Firewall Example Image

Once done, press Create Firewall.

Your new Security Profile will be displayed, with the name being a combination of an unique identifier and your chosen name.

Shows notification for successfully adding a Security Group for Firewall Profiles

Deleting Firewall Profiles

If you wish to delete a firewall profil, press the Delete button next to the profile among the drop-down under actions you wish to delete.

Delete Firewall Image

Adding / Deleting Rules

Adding Rules

Selecting the drop down next to the firewall you want to add a rule for. This will expand the full list of firewall rules already applied to this firewall. Then select Add Rule on the right.

add firewall rule cloud portal

You’ll be prompted with the window seen below:

Add Rule Image

To add rules, you’ll need to set the direction of the traffic the rule enforces, the protocol, IP type, Min and Max ports. Here’s a brief description of what each of these mean:

Direction: The direction of the traffic that the rule applies to, incoming will be traffic inbound to the instance, and outgoing will be traffic from the instance.
Protocol: Specifies the type of traffic, ICMP, TCP, UDP
IP Type: The IP type that the rule applies to: IPv4, or IPv6
Start Port: The minimum port that the rule applies to
End Port: The maximum port that the rule applies to

Deleting Rules

To delete a rule, press the Delete button next to the rule.

Applying Firewall Profiles To An Instance

To apply a security group to an instance, navigate to the Instance’s Cloud Control Panel page and select the server you wish to apply your Firewall(s) to

Hostwinds Select Instance Image

You can locate this area by quickly selecting the Servers drop-down in your Cloud Control portal and choosing Instances

Instance Location Image

Now choose the Firewall Profile tab of the instance, and choose Change

Instance Firewall Tab Location Image

From here, you can select the Security Group you wish to apply to your instance.

Once selected, press the Confirm button to confirm the security group change.

The Default security group is the hwdefault. This security group allows everything. As without this group, no traffic would be allowed to the instance from any direction.

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