Fedora 18 Firewall Daemonology

Fedora 18 ships with a new firewall daemon. While this is a commendable idea, the execution is somewhat useless, because it is not documented. There is a nice looking wizard, which probably made perfect sense to the developer, but which doesn't help anyone else much.

If you are running a simple desktop system, then the default is probably OK, but if you use the machine for development work, then this toy is probably best disabled for the foreseeable future. Of course, disable is not one of the wizard features.

Stake the Firewall Daemon

You can drive a silver tipped wooden stake through the daemon with two commands:
# systemctl stop firewalld.service
# systemctl mask firewalld.service

and now life should be back to normal.

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