Firewall – Copy UFW rules between servers

I would not get the cheapest firewall. You need to look at your requirements such as throughput, active connections, security, vpn requirements and more. If it needs to be cheap I would recommend setting up a separate linux box as the firewall using iptables. If there is budget for a firewall but you need something small consider the cisco asa 5505(smaller than 1U), or if you need something with more requirements consider the 5510 or 5520 which are rack mountable. The cisco firewalls have a gui interface and after initial setup can be relatively easy to manage.

There are two problems that need to be solved here:

1. generate a list of ufw rule numbers which match a desired string.
2. have the shell expand this list and tack it on the end of a sequence of 'ufw delete [rule number]' commands.

I think I have a solution for problem #1 via this one liner in bash:

ufw status numbered |(grep '80/tcp'|awk -F"[][]" '{print $2}')

The example above matches any firewall rule for the string '80/tcp' and prints just the rule number with the brackets stripped.

I have not solved problem #2 yet because as best I can tell, the 'ufw delete' command does not have a switch that suppresses the '(y|n)' confirmation prompt, thus foiling automation.

You can run the command below however and manually hammer out each rule deletion by hitting the 'y' key to confirm and then up arrow => enter to rinse and repeat

ufw delete $(ufw status numbered |(grep '80/tcp'|awk -F"[][]" '{print $2}'))