firewalld Rules Lost After Reboot on New Host

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Required service ports close after reboot causing application outage.

Environment & Reproduction

Administrator adds runtime-only rules using firewall-cmd without –permanent.

Root Cause Analysis

Runtime rules are not persisted to permanent configuration.

Quick Triage

Compare firewall-cmd –list-all and –list-all –permanent outputs.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Audit active zone assignment and check service/port mappings for expected interfaces.

Solution – Primary Fix

Apply rules with –permanent then firewall-cmd –reload.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Use Ansible firewalld module to enforce declarative permanent state.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

Rules remain present after reboot and service checks pass.

Rollback Plan

Remove recently added permanent rules and reload to previous baseline.

Prevention & Hardening

Disallow ad-hoc runtime-only changes in production.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Connection refused after reboot, zone mismatch issues.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for oracle-linux-10.

View all oracle-linux-10 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

firewalld and firewall-cmd manuals for permanent configuration.