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I'll confess at the start that I'm asking this question only after finding the answer and wanting to share it with everyone else. If this is bad form, then my sincere apologies and I'm open to the suggestions on the right way to share this hard-won information. If this is a repeat, please do close it and point visitors to the original question.

So, how can I configure firewalld (in my case, using CentOS 7.6) to block all outgoing traffic except for specific ports while also allowing localhost to access any of its own local ports?

I started out with this:

# First, allow outbound traffic for all allowed inbound traffic 
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 0 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT 

# Allow outbound HTTP, HTTPS, DNS
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type=ping -j ACCEPT 
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT 
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT 
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT 

# Block all other outbound traffic 
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 2 -j DROP

And this all worked fine for locking down a server from getting to anything but websites and DNS.

But any local services trying to get to other local services via localhost network communication were blocked. Worse still, even with firewalld configured to log dropped packets, outbound drops were not being logged.

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The answer, I found by some trial and error, because searching for this exact (possibly odd) scenario on Google or elsewhere was fruitless:

# Allow all outbound traffic from localhost to localhost
firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -o lo -j ACCEPT

This allows local services to communicate with any other local services (even if the IP assigned to the target services are something other than 127.0.0.1).

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  • Thanks for this! I'm using a centos as firewall as well but was wondering how to allow all outgoing connections from my "internal" zone. Do you think this modification of your rule would do the trick? firewall-cmd --direct --add-rule ipv4 filter OUTPUT 1 -o eth2 -j ACCEPT (where eth2 is my internal interface) Would you know a way to apply this rule over the zone instead?
    – flpgdt
    Mar 25, 2019 at 15:09
  • I am very, very far from an expert on the subject, however your modification looks like it should work to allow outbound access to anything routed through your eth2 network interface. Unfortunately, direct rules cannot be associated with zones, as far as I understand it, because they are essentially equivalent to setting up rules using the old iptables methods.
    – John T.
    Mar 27, 2019 at 14:47

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