What Am I Missing? Port Forwarding/Websites not working New to Networking.
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Hey everyone. I've been watching videos, reading documents, changing settings, reinstalling, factory resetting, backing up and restoring for the past 2 days with pfSense 2.4.4. I have some interesting issues I cannot resolve. I don't have extensive networking experience so I'm just not understanding what I'm doing wrong here. I had everything working great for a while then it all just quit. I'm really trying to learn this system but its getting to be quite frustrating. this is my last effort to get this working otherwise I will just abandon pfsense and go back to working routers.
I have pfsense installed on an old HP ThinClient with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 4gb ram and an intel quad nic. I have no packages installed (no av or proxy)
I use a ddns service that is provided for free by my dvr manufacturer. both dvrs are capable of keeping this updated but only one is configured to update it every 12 hours. My isp refreshes my IP every 7 days or so or if we lose power. both DVRs, both need 2 ports forwarded each, example 9000,9001 for DVR 1 and 9002,9003 for DVR 2. They both have different firmware, different interfaces, both use the same smartphone app. Both devices are DHCP and static IPs are set in pfsense DHCP server. The moble app uses http port (which i have changed from 80 to 9000 and 9002 per dvr) and the desktop app uses server ports (6036 defaults but I changed to 9001 and 9003). Ive changed from using 81-84 for these ports just because.
I've tried setting up 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4, isp prvided dns, port forwarding, etc. I wanted to completely turn off all security and just open it wide up and start turning on security to see what keeps messing things up. What I don;t understand is why i cant access my cable company's website and why other web pages (youtube, facebook, etc) either take 15 seconds before they load or don't load at all. I'm on a 25x5 connection and speed tests show my full speeds.
I'm lost, I'm trying to learn but this is frustrating. Any help would be appreciated and I can provide screenshots to whatever you need.
I cannot access my cable company's website or my email, websites randomly load slow or not at all, i have 2 cctv dvrs that I cannot access from a DDNS address whether from inside the lan or over lte from my phone, sometimes the pfsense interface will not load until I refresh my network card on my pc.
All of my devices have static IPs that I have setup in pfsense.
Merged from other post
Just an update. I was able to get port forwarding to work. I found a video about Firewall Aliases which helped a lot! I don't know how I missed it but it saved me. Both camera systems are working just fine. My only issue now is I still cannot access my ISP website and email on multiple devices. I can access it from my phone over LTE but not while connected to WiFi or from my desktop. Being able to access this email from multiple devices is a must so routing to one device is not an option.
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Basically, you broke your LAN.
Any device on your LAN should resolve something like "mail.your-isp.tld", obtaining the IP, and then connect to it on port 993,995,465, 143 or 110.
As a web browser would resolver "forum.netgate.com" and the connect to this forum using port 443.Tell use what you did, and w'll tell you what was wrong.
LAN Firewall rules ?
What did you remove from default ? -
Why would you create another thread? Moving this to the first thread you started.
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@johnpoz Didn't do it on purpose, sorry
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@gertjan Everything else works but access to my ISP website and email. I can access any other website. It doesn't matter what I do, I don't have access to my isp email or website after a clean install with no config changes. I have firewall rules for my cctv equipment and that works fine now. I have a regular arris cable modem, none of that wireless/cable/router combo garbage. It seems like maybe a dns issue? I can ping it from the router, tracert from windows "unable to resolve target"
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And what is this fqdn your trying to resolve.. Here is the thing its possible that your mail server doesn't resolve on the public, and the only way to resolve it is if you use their DNS... This is freaking HORRIBLE design... But if that is the case you would just need to create a domain override pointing the domain your fqdn of your mail server is to your isp NS..
Out of the box pfsense resolves.. so if your isp is only allowing its mail server or website to resolve from their NS then yeah that would fail.
Post up the fqdn of this mail server and website your trying to access and will tell you for sure if it resolves on the public or not.
Is it something like smtp.yourisp.com or www.yourispdomain.com
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Forgive my ignorance, I don't understand what you are asking for. Are you asking for the mail server? The mail server is mail.echoes.net port 993. Their website, adamscable.com.
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@itstheburns said in What Am I Missing? Port Forwarding/Websites not working New to Networking.:
mail.echoes.net:993 adamscable.com.
Those work fine from here.
What do you have DHCP configured to give to your clients? What are that windows client's active DNS servers?
What does
nslookup mail.echoes.net
output? -
Yeah exactly
That resolves just fine
;mail.echoes.net. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: mail.echoes.net. 3600 IN A 72.28.1.14 mail.echoes.net. 3600 IN A 72.28.1.13
And so does
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;adamscable.com. IN A;; ANSWER SECTION:
adamscable.com. 3600 IN A 72.28.3.145If you can not resolve it, then you dicked with the settings or your ISP is dicking with your ability to resolve.. Out of the box pfsense resolves, ie talks down from roots to find the authoritative NS for the domain your asking about.
If your ISP messes with that, or your latency is too high then yeah you could have problems.
Port 993 is encrypted IMAP.. If you did did not change the default lan rules any any is allowed. And prob just a DNS problem.. Go to pfsense dns lookup does that resolve? Can you please post the output of this screen
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Same for me.
It works just fine outside of my network with pfsense. It works just fine if I connect my old router.
I got it working. I added 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I kept glossing over this page for some reason and missed DNS Servers.
I don't know why they have their dns setup the way it is and I don't know why it works fine with my asus router but its working now. If theres a better or different way, I'm open to learning how to do it.
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Great. What about resolving on the CLIENT that is failing?
nslookup mail.echoes.net
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Yeah its working. tracert as well to both mail.echoes.net, echoes.net and adamscable.com.
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OK then what about in the browser? What does it say exactly when you try to go to adamscable.com?
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It loads the page as it should, on all devices
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So what's the problem?
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No problem now, its all working as it should. I added google's dns servers to the dhcp server page.
@itstheburns said in What Am I Missing? Port Forwarding/Websites not working New to Networking.:
I got it working. I added 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I kept glossing over this page for some reason and missed DNS Servers.
I don't know why they have their dns setup the way it is and I don't know why it works fine with my asus router but its working now. If theres a better or different way, I'm open to learning how to do it.
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Without any idea what the non-working setup looked like it's really hard to say.
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The original issue was that I could not get port forwarding to work with my camera NVRs (2 of them), some websites were slow or not loading and could not access my ISP's website and email.
I had port forwarding setup in the wrong order or something. I reinstalled pfsense and redid all of the port forwarding rules after I found a very detailed video that basically explained firewall aliases much better than the pfsense documentation. That made setting up my port forwarding so much easier and took only 5 mins Port forwarding is working as it should and lightning fast compared to before.
As for my ISPs website or email not working, I was not able to access those from within my network on any client, whether it be PC or mobile device. It all worked fine on my asus router before I started using pfsense so I was stumped. My ISP is probably doing some wonky stuff with resolving or whatever. By adding Google's DNS servers has fixed this issue. Nothing else I tried was able to fix it. I would only change one setting at a time, apply and retry. If that did not work, I would revert back and try a different setting.
In short, everything seems to be working on every client both within and outside my network.