Bridging and firewalling KVM guests on debian with shorewall

This post is mainly for documentation purposes, since this is a task one does not have to do on a daily basis and it always takes some time to get back into the matter. The scenario is a debian kvm host, running libvirt for kvm virtual machines and shorewall for firewalling. The ip address of the guest shall be 192.0.43.10.

First we want to configure the network interface eth0 as bridge, which we’ll call vmbr0. For this we edit the /etc/network/interfaces so it contains the following:

iface eth0 inet manual
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet dhcp
    bridge_ports eth0
    bridge_stp off
    bridge_fd 0
    up route add -host 192.0.43.10 dev vmbr0
    down route del -host 192.0.43.10 dev vmbr0

Now we can assign our virtual machine the device vmbr0 as bridge, for example via <source bridge='vmbr0'/> in the respective xml-file in /etc/libvirt/qemu/ or via virt-manager. Next we need to configure shorewall; for this we copy an example from /usr/share/doc/shorewall/examples/ into /etc/shorewall/ and change every entry from eth0 to vmbr0, so vmbr0 is associated with the zone net. Now we can edit the rules file to something like this:

# the virtual machine shall have unrestricted access
ACCEPT         net:192.0.43.10    net
# sshing and pinging shall be allowed from everywhere
SSH(ACCEPT)    net               net:192.0.43.10
Ping(ACCEPT)   net               net:192.0.43.10
# we want http to only be accessible from our /16 subnet
ACCEPT         net:192.0.0.0/16  net:192.0.43.10 tcp 80
ACCEPT         net:192.0.0.0/16  net:192.0.43.10 tcp 443
# reject everything that's not explicitly allowed
REJECT         net               net:192.0.43.10

And this was all. Not very hard to do, but if you don’t add guests very often, it’s easy to forget how to setup a bridge in debian or in which order shorewall matches the rules, namely going through them in order and apply one as soon as it matches.