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FirewallD and network bridge to protect qemu/kvm

+1 vote
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I'd like to configure FirewallD to protect qemu/kvm host and maybe guests but the second one is not so important for me because each guest has it's own firewall.

What I don't understand is how FirewallD works with network bridges. Currently, I have bridge (br0) in trusted zone to allow as much traffic as possible, and p3p1 (which is NIC connected to switch) in public zone. When I put bridge in public zone I cut off networking from guests.

My question is, should I change rules on bridge or p3p1 and what is the correlation between them? What should I configure to pass networking traffic to guests but protect all ports on host system?

posted Aug 23, 2013 by Naveena Garg

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1 Answer

+1 vote

Take a look at

http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Fedora.2FRHEL_Bridging
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=512206

I believe the default now is to set the following to disable netfiltering traffic for the bridge:

sysctl
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0

Then your firewall only needs to consider p3p1. The hosts on the VM side of the bridge will need their own firewalls.

answer Aug 24, 2013 by Garima Jain
Thanks, now I understand what is going on there but I've encountered another problem. I've net.* entries in /etc/sysctl.conf that you mentioned above but they're not applied on system startup (or they're changes later by something - maybe firewalld?). I have to run sysctl manually.
This may be because of the way systemd now handles sysctl.conf. On a fresh Fedora 19 install, my /etc/sysctl.conf reads:

# System default settings live in /usr/lib/sysctl.d/00-system.conf.
# To override those settings, enter new settings here, or in an /etc/sysctl.d/.conf file
# For more information, see sysctl.conf(5) and sysctl.d(5).

For me, I didn't need to do anything special, since
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=512206 has been the default for a while.
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