Unblocking Kibana port 5601 on Fedora

This post describes how you can unblock port 5601 to allow Kibana traffic through in the Fedora firewall.

Unblocking port 5601 so traffic can get through to Kibana

By default Fedora 28 has a firewall which blocks traffic reaching port 5601. This stops you being able to access Kibana on this port from an external machine.

One of the ways to get around this is to forward port 5601 to another port that is accessible. However I wanted to use port 5601 for Kibana so I had to change the firewall to make it accessible externally.

To disable this permanently and reload the firewall configuration so it’s immediately available you can run the following commands.

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=5601/tcp
systemctl restart firewalld

This adds an exception for the Kibana service and unblocks port 5601 on a permanent basis.

This should ensure that even after reboots it should stay unblocked.

Security warning with allowing all traffic to port 5601

When opening a port up in the firewall you open it up for everyone to be able to access. If you are opening port 5601 you need to make sure your Kibana install is properly protected.

One such method is using the x-pack security module to limit the users who can access it.