Topic: Help - port forwarding has stopped working

[mchettle]

Hello to all experienced sme admin's. Love this system (mostly). Always willing to promote its benefits to anyone who will listen. Great work by all who contribute to it.

Now to my problem. I have been using the port forwarding successfully for years, but recently needed to move ftp and other services to a new machine on my internal network. Since doing this, none of my port forwarding is now working. Returning the ports to original settings, or rebooting server do not appear to work. I would be grateful for any help.

On a similar, subject, does anyone provide (professional) support services for the sme server. Links to their bio's would be great.

Kind Regards, Mark.

[Stefano]

Mark:
- SME's version?
- any error in log files?
- any other useful info?

BTW, this should be posted in bugzilla too

[mchettle]

Oh, sorry, of cause :: SME 7.5.1 running on P4 Hardware. (Shuttle xpc, with added network card).

How do i filter for an error on port forward requests in the log files (or which area should i have a look at) ?

All other services on the server appear to be working just fine, DHCP, all good, IP's change as requested in hosts area. Pointing of the services work from the internal network, (eg: http://xxx.yyyy.com:8000 , all good internally, but has stopped from outside the network). Everything is working fine, juts the port forwarding services have stopped.

Regards
Mark

[mmccarn]

... move ftp and other services to a new machine on my internal network...

FTP is tricky with port forwarding (http://www.ncftp.com/ncftpd/doc/misc/ftp_and_firewalls.html).

You may have to customize the FTP configuration on the internal FTP server in order to get it to work correctly (specifically, you may need to configure the port range used by the FTP server for PASV connections to match a port-forwarding range configured in the SME).

Firewall log events are kept in /var/log/iptables/current, but an incorrect forwarding configuration might not generate any log entries. It looks from my logs as though only "deny" events get logged; connections that are forwarded but which are then not accepted by the target host on the LAN would not generate any entries.

[mchettle]

OK, problem solved.

I removed all existing port forward entries. Then backed up the server to the desktop.
Then i setup a new fresh SME 8 server and restored the backup to configure the server. Then i re-entered all the port forwarding settings... bingo, all good now.

Still not sure why, maybe some sort of corruption, may never know, happy now.

Thanks for your help.
Mark