The firewall appears to be blocking outgoing text messages from my phone ...
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I swapped out a Fresh Tomato NAT box for an SG-3100 last weekend and now both my wife (Galaxy S4 on Verizon) and I (Galaxy S10 on Verizon) are having issues with SMS over Wifi. Although I have an IPv6 firewall rule (Pass/IPv6/Any) for the VLAN the phones connect to, the ISP does not yet support IPv6 so I wonder how the "disable IPv6" workaround I see here might work for me.
I have a lot of experiments to run to try to resolve this issue for myself. I also have a second ISP that supports IPv6 so I can play with that too. In the mean time, I'm getting the wife a Pixel 4a to keep the peace. More later...
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@NineEyes Keep us posted if you find a solution. There have been many reports of problems with Samsung, but I'm not sure it has ever been tracked down to a specific issue, other than the availability of IPv6 makes it choke. For me, disabling IPv6 to workaround what a believe is a Samsung problem makes no sense.
If it is a Samsung phone problem, then the solution is to ditch Samsung and keep using IPv6. Although I know getting rid of a new phone is painful.
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@NineEyes - have you tried the suggestion here yet, i.e. changing the Firewall Optimization to conservative?
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/155113/wifi-calling-issue
A family member also has a Samsung Galaxy Android phone - this change seems to have resolved all issues (WiFi calling and SMS related) for us.
Hope this helps.
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@tman222 - Your link looks promising. Thank you! I will definitely try it and report back when I have some solid data.
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After 22 days of solid SMS performance with my Galaxy S10, I'm ready to call changing "Firewall Optimization Options" to "Conservative" a roaring success. Thanks @tman222!
I also like @MagneticMuffin 's explanation enough that I do not intend to research this further.
Thanks all!
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Wow! I started this thread over a year and a half ago, and it looks like we may finally have a definitive solution. Three of the four members of my family still use Samsung phones, so I'm excited to give this a shot.
Is there any downside to changing the firewall optimization to "Conservative"? What exactly does this setting do?
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@gweempose said in The firewall appears to be blocking outgoing text messages from my phone ...:
Wow! I started this thread over a year and a half ago, and it looks like we may finally have a definitive solution. Three of the four members of my family still use Samsung phones, so I'm excited to give this a shot.
Is there any downside to changing the firewall optimization to "Conservative"? What exactly does this setting do?
Hi @gweempose - please check out the link below for some more info - essentially the difference between the various optimization modes is how quickly the firewall expires entries in the state table (i.e. in conservative mode this would happen more slowly):
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/config/advanced-firewall-nat.html#firewall-optimization-options
Hope this helps.
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I am also able to confirm firewall optimization option set to conservative fixed the Samsung phone problem on my network as well.
Even though I have long since disposed of the only Samsung phone in our household as a workaround for this vexing problem, a relative has a Samsung phone. Previously it failed, now with the revised pfsense firewall configuration it works reliably.
I can't help but wonder if conservative is the more-appropriate default option for pfsense as installed.
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I have now been using the new "Coservative" firewall settings for over two weeks, and I can say with confidence that it 100% fixed the problem with my Samsung Galaxy S8+. No more issue with texts. No more issue with wi-fi calling. Everything works exactly as it should.
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