How to install CSF (Config Server Firewall) on CentOS 8

ConfigServer Firewall, also known as CSF, is a firewall configuration script created to provide better security for your server while giving you an advanced, easy to use interface for managing firewall settings. ConfigServer Firewall also comes with a service called Login Failure Daemon, or LFD

Prerequisites

• CentOS 8 (CentOS 7 will also work).
• root privileges to your CentOS Server

What we will do in this tutorial:

• Install the dependencies for CSF.
• Install CSF.
• Configure CSF.
• Basic CSF commands.
• Advanced Configuration.

Installation of dependencies

Since CSF is based on perl, you will need to make sure that you have the right dependencies to ensure your installation is flawless.

You need wget to download the CSF installer and vim (or an editor of your choice) for editing the CSF configuration file. Install the packages with the yum command:

Time to Install

To start go to the “/usr/src/” directory and download CSF with wget command. You can do it by following this command.

cd /usr/src/wget https://download.configserver.com/csf.tgz

Extract the tar.gz file and go to the csf directory, then install it:

tar -xzf csf.tgzcd csfsh install.sh

You should get the information that CSF installation is completed at the end.

Now you should check that CSG really works on this server. Go to the “/usr/local/csf/bin/” directory, and run “csftest.pl”.

cd /usr/local/csf/bin/perl csftest.pl

If you see the test results as shown below, then CSF is running without problems on your server:

RESULT: csf should function on this server

You did it! You’ve now installed CSF on your server and are ready to start configuring CSF, which we will cover in another article.