Just FYI, unless you have installed another firewall, shutting down FIrewallD means every port/application on your VM is now open to the world.
And shutting down fail2ban means people/bots can password guess ALL day, thousands of times an hour.
Hopefully you have other such protections in place.
Sorry it caused frustration! It was documented in the VM6 release notes (and a few other places, though our docs are a mess right now and need a major overhaul), and during installation you’ll see both services getting configured during “phase 3”. It’ll say “Configuring Firewalld” and “Configuring Fail2ban” and it’ll also show up in the logs, and we have modules for both in Webmin, so you can see what rules are in effect from the GUI.
Disabling it is generally fine. I mean, firewalld provides a little bit of protection to have a firewall (but much less than many people think, in a server environment). fail2ban is pretty useful, though, as it allows shutting down some kinds of brute force attack that aren’t handled well by the services themselves. Webmin has pretty good brute force protection built in, but sshd and mail and a few others don’t really handle it very well. And, there’s also the benefit of when one service is being attacked, it shuts down access for all services from the offending IP, so that makes it that much harder for an attacker to get it via brute force.