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.
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.
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.
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
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
The prompt will request the name of the profile and a short description of the group you’re creating.
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.
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.
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.
You’ll be prompted with the window seen below:
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
You can locate this area by quickly selecting the Servers drop-down in your Cloud Control portal and choosing Instances
Now choose the Firewall Profile tab of the instance, and choose Change
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.