With RHEL 7 / CentOS 7, firewalld was introduced to manage iptables. IMHO, firewalld is more suited for workstations than for server environments.
It is possible to go back to a more classic iptables setup. First, stop and mask the firewalld service:
systemctl stop firewalld systemctl mask firewalld
Then, install the iptables-services package:
yum install iptables-services
Enable the service at boot-time:
systemctl enable iptables
Managing the service
systemctl [stop|start|restart] iptables
Saving your firewall rules can be done as follows:
service iptables save
or
/usr/libexec/iptables/iptables.init save
I had the problem that rebooting wouldn't start iptables.
This fixed it:
yum install iptables-services systemctl mask firewalld systemctl enable iptables systemctl enable ip6tables systemctl stop firewalld systemctl start iptables systemctl start ip6tables