Setup ConfigServer Security and Firewall (CSF) on CentOS 7

ConfigServer Security & Firewall (CSF) is a stateful packet inspection firewall (SPI), login/intrusion detection, and security application for Linux servers. It is a very popular security suite, but isn’t officially supported yet on CentOS 7.

CentOS 7 uses firewalld rather than iptables. A quick internet search will show that many faithful CentOS users find firewalld far too complicated for their needs and are reverting back to iptables. Iptables was the standard firewall for CentOS 5 and 6.

This guide shows you how to disable firewalld, install IP tables, CSF dependencies, and CSF.

Install CSF

Stop and disable firewalld.

   systemctl disable firewalld
   systemctl stop firewalld

Install iptables.

   yum -y install iptables-services

Create files needed by iptables.

  touch /etc/sysconfig/iptables
  touch /etc/sysconfig/iptables6

Start iptables.

  systemctl start iptables
  systemctl start ip6tables

Enable iptables at boot.

  systemctl enable iptables
  systemctl enable ip6tables

Install the CSF dependencies.

  yum -y install wget perl unzip net-tools perl-libwww-perl perl-LWP-Protocol-https perl-GDGraph -y

Download and launch the CSF installer.

  cd /opt
  wget https://download.configserver.com/csf.tgz
  tar -xzf csf.tgz
  cd csf
  sh install.sh

Remove the installation files.

 rm -rf /opt/csf
 rm /opt/csf.tgz 

(Optional) Webmin integration

If you use Webmin, then you can install the CSF Webmin module.

Login to Webmin and navigate to the following page.

Webmin > Webmin Configuration > Webmin Modules >

Click “From local file” and insert the following.

  /usr/local/csf/csfwebmin.tgz > 

Install the module.