Port forwarding vs. firewall rules

We just installed a Balance 30 and I’m trying to understand the relationship between the port forwarding and firewall rules settings because something seems to be acting strangely. If I have the default inbound firewall rule denying all inbound traffic yet have certain ports set to forward to various machines on our LAN does the default firewall rule override the fact that I’ve told those ports to forward and block them anyway? If so, would creating firewall rules that allow those ports in and putting those rules above the default rule in the rule list override the default rule and allow the ports through? Today I tried exactly what I’ve just described, which is setting some ports to forward, creating firewall rules to allow those ports in and then setting the default firewall inbound traffic rule to “deny”. When the default rule was set to “deny” none of those ports were being forwarded,even with the rules above it explicitly allowing those ports. As soon as I changed the default rule to “allow” the traffic was getting through, although I’d think that makes the other rules pointless as the default rule allows all traffic. I’m assuming something is going wrong as this doesn’t sound like correct operation to me. Please let me know how it SHOULD be working or if I’m just not “getting it”. Thanks.

p.s. The unit is brand new (we just got it today) and it’s been upgraded to the latest firmware.

You had it setup correctly, the firewall rules override the port forwarding. If your default rule is “deny”, then you need to have the proper “allow” rules above it.

Please double check all your rules, and if you need further assistance you can open a support ticket via our site:
http://www.peplink.com/contact/support/

Turns out there was a new firware released on the evening of the 17th and after installing it the problem I described above went away and now everything appears to be behaving correctly. Thanks for the response.

Awesome! Glad you got it working - enjoy your Peplink!