Question What firewall rules are useful?

[BMG Germany]

Hi.

I have a new Plesk installation on my server.
The firewall rules are as follows. Can someone give me a tip on how to set this up in the most sensible way?
And is it possible to restore the firewall rules from a backup via Acronis etc.?

DHCP client	Allow incoming from all
FTP server passive ports	Allow incoming from all
Plesk Installer	Allow incoming from all
Plesk-management interface	Allow incoming from all
WWW-Server	Allow incoming from all
FTP-Server	Allow incoming from all
SSH-Server (Secure-Shell-Server)	Allow incoming from all
SMTP-Server (Übermittlungsport)	Allow incoming from all
SMTP-Server (für E-Mail-Versand)	Allow incoming from all
POP3-Server (für E-Mail-Empfang)	Allow incoming from all
IMAP-Server (für E-Mail-Empfang)	Allow incoming from all
Password Change Servicefür E-Mail	Allow incoming from all
MySQL-Server	Allow incoming from all
PostgreSQL-Server	Allow incoming from all
Samba (Dateifreigabe in Windows-Netzwerken)	Allow incoming from all
Domainnamenserver	Allow incoming from all
IPv6 Neighbor Discovery	Allow incoming from all
Ping-Dienst	Allow incoming from all
System policy for inbound traffic	Deny other incoming traffic
System policy for outbound traffic	Allow other outbound traffic
System policy for forwarding traffic	Weiterleitung von sonstigem Traffic verweigern

Thanks and Best
Tom

 

[dsherron]

Hi Tom,

Also a fairly new Pleskian and I have a question similar to yours and default rules similar to yours. Did you ever get an answer anywhere?

- Scott

 

[scsa20]

The Plesk Firewall on Linux utilizes iptables. When you go to apply the changes you can choose to view a preview which will give you a bash script of what it's going to be running. You could, technically, save that script. The way it's applied is automatically determine based off of the rules you have set up. You can learn more from this article:

(Plesk for Linux) The Plesk Firewall

The Plesk firewall is a tool you can use to improve the security of your Plesk for Linux server by restricting network connections to and/or from the server.

docs.plesk.com

 

[dsherron]

Thanks! Looking for more of a "what/why" than a "how" type of explanation or pointer to some resources to learn.

More along the lines of this (from Smashing Mag Firewalls Intro article):

For a basic Web and email server with the Plesk management interface, you could configure your firewall to:

• Allow incoming connections from anywhere to TCP ports 25 (SMTP), 80 (Web server), 110 (POP email accounts), 143 (IMAP email accounts), 443 (secure Web server), 587 (SMTP)
• Restrict incoming connections to ports TCP 22 (SSH), 8443 (Plesk unless you use Plesk to configure the firewall)
• Allow outgoing connections from any port on the server to the remote TCP ports 25 (SMTP), 80 (web), 443 (secure web), 587 (SMTP) and UDP 53 (DNS lookups)
• Deny everything else

If you allow additional services, you will need to open up additional ports. This could include automatic backups, security scans or remote database access.

 

[hilly]

i have a firewall option before it hits the server, and then we have a firewall within plesk itself, i'd like to give plesk additional security so i can limit who can access port 22

see example rules below that i had setup, it works but with this setup, wordpress integrity checker no longer works and it reports all wordpress websites are showing "Unresponsive WordPress site" within the dashboard and wordpress websites take longer to load, once the firewall is disabled, it runs normally