How to install CSF to your VPS or dedicated server

Protecting your server with a firewall is always a good idea. Not using a firewall means your server will be attacked through open ports and even brute force attacked.

Brute Forcing a password is a technique used by many attackers who use software programs. These programs or “bots” cycle through lists of millions of passwords until they get the correct one. By using a firewall you can limit the number of guesses people have before their IP is blacklisted.

By Deploying a software firewall like CSF server administrators can provide some protection against the many threats out there. Administrators can use other ways to protect servers like changing the SSH port and even hiding what versions of software you are running like Bind (See hide name-server version).

Custom SSH Ports

If you have changed your ssh port you will need to go to the ipv4 settings and replace “22” with the port you have chosen for ssh.

Download & Install CSF

Installing CSF is very simply. Run the commands below;

cd /usr/src
rm -fv csf.tgz
wget https://download.configserver.com/csf.tgz
tar -xzf csf.tgz
cd csf
sh install.sh

Test CSF

Next, test weather you have the required IP Tables modules:

perl /etc/csf/csftest.pl

Don’t worry if you cannot run all the features, so long as the script doesn’t
report any FATAL errors.

Other Firewalls

You should not run any other iptables firewall configuration script. For example, if you previously used APF+BFD you can remove it with the below command;

sh /etc/csf/remove_apf_bfd.sh

That’s it. You can then configure CSF and lfd by editing the files
directly in /etc/csf/ file, or cPanel servers use the WHM UI

When you install CSF on a cPanel server CSF will automatically add all the standard ports to the configuration file for you. You could combine CSF with DDoS Deflate

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