I use my LAN Ethernet adapters set to public zone (public zone is standard), and services/ports are defined in the the same zone, obviously. Those are the defaults for 15.2 and 15.3, I think.
These is no access to the network besides the LAN, i.e., no servers open to the www.
Sometimes I think that it would have been better if they would have named those pre-suggested zones as Agnes, Bob and Charlie. To stress that they are only names. But no, for those that know what a firewall is supposed to do, it would only be annoying.
Do you mean all adapters of one system, or adapters of several systems?
I think you already got the idea now. I firewall will block or not types of traffic between parts of the network called “zones”. Thus a firewall is normally connected to several zones and the traffic goes through the firewall system (or is blocked) from one zone to another. Thus you have to tell the firewall which NIC(s) is (are) connected to which zone. To make that easy, those zones are given names. The names do not matter, but to make it easy for the firewall manager, meaningful names are chosen. So when the firewall is on the border between a home network and the internet, names like “home” and “external” or “public” are informative. When you have a firewall sitting between an intranet and the internet and also having a DMZ, you probably will choose other names.
As I understand it, the firewall you use has already a few names predefined. That is only trying to be helpful, but you can choose your names as you like them. Of course, when you read Howtos, etc. you can find other names again. But they are only to give an indication on what the purpose of the zone is. You have to translate that (as so many other things in those articles) to your own situation.
Actually, the “firewalld” RPM package drops the default Zone definitions into ‘/usr/lib/firewalld/zones/’ –
/usr/lib/firewalld/zones is used for default and fallback configurations and /etc/firewalld/zones is used for user created and customized configuration files.
