Hi folks. 

 

Have been running multiple FMS instances in macOS for quite some time, but we're mainly a Linux hosting company, so have been looking at FMS Linux on Ubuntu.  It's all running fine, except for one thing which I hope someone can help me with.

When we setup our other VMs on Linux, we use IPTables firewall in a number of standard ways to secure the VPS as a whole (regardless of what application(s) are running on it).  Now the default setup of FMS on Ubuntu Linux (and CentOS before it I think) uses firewalld to manage connection permissions.  This is just an interface to IPtables I think, and so I spend some time learning how to do the things I need to do using the firewall-cmd command rather than my normal method.  However, I couldn't get it to work the way I wanted, so I decided to try stripping out all the default FMS-inserted rules and building my own firewall config.  

The thing is, it seems that FMS is using firewalld / IPtables to do more than just allow/deny access from certain IP numbers, as without the rules which FMS ships with, it doesn't work either.  So, I was planning to research what FMS uses firewalld for, aside from access control lists from external IP numbers.  Does anyone know if there's an article written about this topic?

I've been running FileMaker Server on Ubuntu since that was an option. I turn off firewalld and instead use ufw, which is the default firewall for Ubuntu Server 18 & 20. It integrates well with IP Tables.

I know that doesn't answer your specific question about info on the topic, but from my experience FileMaker Server doesn't need firewalld at all, except maybe during initial FMS installation.

HTH

-Kent