The harden scripts logged 'deny-by-default INPUT; carries the sshguard jump' even on Alma, where the firewall is firewalld (no INPUT chain, no jump). Make the message backend-neutral, and when ENABLE_FIREWALL=0 on rhel skip the iptables boot-hook entirely -- sshguard's firewalld backend manages its own ipset blocks. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>