A new release of Firewalld 2.3 has been announced, introducing a dynamically controlled inter-grid screen that operates above the NFTables and IPTables package filters. Firewalld, written in Python and distributed under the GPLv2 license, is a background process that allows for dynamic changes to packet filter rules via d-bus without the need to restart or disrupt existing connections. This project is currently integrated into various Linux distributions such as RHEL 7+, Fedora 18+, and SUSE/Opensuse 15+.
Firewall-CMD utility is used to manage the inter-grid screen, focusing on service names rather than IP addresses, network interfaces, or port numbers when creating rules. Additional tools like Firewall-Config (GTK) and Firewall-Applet (QT) can also be utilized to configure the inter-grid screen. Furthermore, projects like NetworkManager, Libvirt, Podman, Docker, and Fail2ban offer support for controlling the inter-grid screen through the D-Bus API provided by Firewalld.
The latest release includes several key updates:
- Added Settings SticktForwardports to control the Rules Boards for network ports (DNAT).
- Introduced service for ASEQNET, a client-server application for working with ALSA sequences over the network.
- Included service for the MPD media player (Music Player Daemon).
- Added service for the RadSec (RFC-6614) protocol, enabling the utilization of the Radius protocol over TCP and TLS.
- Introduced service for the system slimevr, which gathers sensor data for tracking body movement in virtual reality systems.