In August 2025, Way to the Web Ltd. the company behind Config Server Security & Firewall (CSF) announced that it will close permanently. So at the beginning of September their whole infrastructure was taken down permanently, causing errors like this to pop up once a day when CSF is trying to perform automatic update:

Cron /usr/sbin/csf -u
Oops: Unable to download: Can't connect to download2.configserver.com:443 (Name or service not known)

An annoying error per se, but the real danger is not in its annoyance but in operating an outdated firewall software, exposing you and your clients to the dangers of the open internet.

How to fix it?

For the time being many web panel and hosting providers are finding a solution in disabling the automatic updates, which removes the annoyance however does not solve the real problem. Luckily before shutting down CSF source code was released under the GPL-3.0 license allowing us and many developers to continue their legacy. And we did, by creating a community driven fork of CSF.

So all that needs to be done is to switch to this new CSF fork, and this can be done by running the following one-liner on your server: 

echo "download.black.host" > /etc/csf/downloadservers

This will modify CSF’s configuration to use the latest release published in the open sourced fork of CSF maintained by us, and on the next cron run CSF will update itself (provided AUTO_UPDATES = 1 is set) but if you’re in a hurry and wish to get this thing resolved once and for all you can start the upgrade process manually by running: csf -u and this will complete the whole process.

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