Untangle Platform and Internal Servers

As some of you may know, this weekend the firewall in front of my main server was knocked out of commission. I was running an old machine loaded with IPCop firewall and I have been meaning to replace the old machine that was there with a newer machine running Untangle Platform. It was the perfect opportunity to replace it.

Untangle is easy to configure so everything was up and running fairly quickly after I downloaded the newest version from Untangle's web site. I went through the Network setup and had all my port forwards working to the outside world, but internally any time I tried hitting one of my web sites it was hitting the internet version of a black hole. I tried every way I could think of to get everything up and running, but still no go.

After playing around with it for a few hours and still no luck, I decided to call it a day. Most of the time when I remove myself from a problem the solution will eventually come to me. This time was no exception. I was watching Home Movies (on Adult Swim, get your head out of the gutter)and about to go to bed last night and it finally hit me. When I set up my port forwarding I did forward all my ports correctly, it was just expecting the Source Interface to be External. Opening up my Port Forwarding configuration, I selected the Internal source interface as well and everything automagically started working.

The moral of the story: if you are having problems hitting internal servers with Untangle running, make sure you are forwarding internal traffic to your servers as well as external traffic.