Apache Port and Firewalls

With the Listen and NameVirtualHost directives, the Apache web server specifies the standard communication ports associated with both the HTTP and HTTPS protocols, 80 and 443. To allow external communication through the noted ports, you can set up both ports as trusted services in the Firewall Configuration tool. Of course, for systems where HTTP and HTTPS are configured on nonstandard ports, you’ll have to adjust the associated iptables rules accordingly. If you just open these ports indiscriminately, it allows traffic from all systems. It may be appropriate to set up a custom rule to limit access to one or more systems or networks. For example, the following custom rules allows access to every system on the 192.168.122.0 network except the one with IP address 192.168.122.150, over port 80. To review, these rules are applied to the iptables command, in order.

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp -s 192.168.122.150 --dport 80 -j REJECT

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp -s 192.168.122.0/24 --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Similar rules may be required for port 443. Of course, that depends on the

requirements of the job.