We take a look at ufw - the uncomplicated firewall - on Linux, providing some insights and commands for making changes.
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The **ufw** (uncomplicated firewall) represents a serious simplification to [iptables][1] and, in the years that it’s been available, has become the default firewall on systems such as Ubuntu and Debian. And, yes, **ufw** is surprisingly uncomplicated – a boon for newer admins who might otherwise have to invest a lot of time to get up to speed on firewall management.
GUIs are available for **ufw** (like **gufw**), but **ufw** commands are generally issued on the command line. This post examines some commands for using **ufw** and looks into how it works.
First, one quick way to see how **ufw** is configured is to look at its configuration file –**/etc/default/ufw**. In the command below, we display the settings, using **grep** to suppress the display of both blank lines and comments (line starting with #).
[RELATED: Linux hardening: a 15-step checklist for a secure Linux server][2]
As you can see, the default policy is to drop input and allow output. Additional rules that allow the connections that you specifically want to be accept are configured separately.
The basic syntax for ufw commands might look like thee below, though this synopsis is not meant to imply that typing only “ufw” will get you further than a quick error telling you that arguments are required.
```
ufw [--dry-run] [options] [rule syntax]
```
The **\--dry-run** option means that **ufw** won’t run the command you specify, but will show you the results that you would see if it did. It will, however, display the entire set of rules as they would exist if the change were made, so be prepared for more than a few lines of output.
To check the status of **ufw**, run a command like the following. Note that even this command requires use of **sudo** or use of the root account.
[][3]
```
$ sudo ufw status
Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22 ALLOW 192.168.0.0/24
9090 ALLOW Anywhere
9090 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
```
Otherwise, you will see something like this:
```
$ ufw status
ERROR: You need to be root to run this script
```
Adding "verbose" provides a few additional details:
You can easily allow and deny connections by port number with commands like these:
```
$ sudo ufw allow 80 <== allow http access
$ sudo ufw deny 25 <== deny smtp access
```
You can check out the **/etc/services** file to find the connections between port numbers and service names.
```
$ grep 80/ /etc/services
http 80/tcp www # WorldWideWeb HTTP
socks 1080/tcp # socks proxy server
socks 1080/udp
http-alt 8080/tcp webcache # WWW caching service
http-alt 8080/udp
amanda 10080/tcp # amanda backup services
amanda 10080/udp
canna 5680/tcp # cannaserver
```
Alternately, you can use service names like in these commands.
```
$ sudo ufw allow http
Rule added
Rule added (v6)
$ sudo ufw allow https
Rule added
Rule added (v6)
```
After making changes, you should check the status again to see that those changes have been made:
```
$ sudo ufw status
Status: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22 ALLOW 192.168.0.0/24
9090 ALLOW Anywhere
80/tcp ALLOW Anywhere <==
443/tcp ALLOW Anywhere <==
9090 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) <==
443/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) <==
```
The rules that **ufw** follows are stored in the **/etc/ufw** directory. Note that you need root access to view these files and that each contains a large number of rules.
```
$ ls -ltr /etc/ufw
total 48
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1391 Aug 15 2017 sysctl.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1004 Aug 17 2017 after.rules
-rw-r----- 1 root root 915 Aug 17 2017 after6.rules
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1130 Jan 5 2018 before.init
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1126 Jan 5 2018 after.init
-rw-r----- 1 root root 2537 Mar 25 2019 before.rules
-rw-r----- 1 root root 6700 Mar 25 2019 before6.rules
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 12 08:21 applications.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 313 Mar 18 17:30 ufw.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1711 Mar 19 10:42 user.rules
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1530 Mar 19 10:42 user6.rules
```
The changes made earlier in this post (the addition of port **80** for **http** access and **443** for **https** (encrypted http) access will look like this in the **user.rules** and **user6.rules** files:
```
# grep " 80 " user*.rules
user6.rules:### tuple ### allow tcp 80 ::/0 any ::/0 in
