NETGEAR VPN Firewall 200 FVX538 manual Inbound Rules Port Forwarding

ProSafe VPN Firewall 200 FVX538 Reference Manual

Table 4-1. Outbound Rules (continued)

Item	Description
QoS Priority	This setting determines the priority of a service which, in turn, determines the quality
	of that service for the traffic passing through the firewall. By default, the priority
	shown is that of the selected service. The user can change it accordingly. If the user
	does not make a selection (i.e., leaves it as None), then the native priority of the
	service will be applied to the policy. See “Setting Quality of Service (QoS) Priorities”
	on page 4-23.
Log	This determines whether packets covered by this rule are logged. Select the desired
	action:
	• Always – always log traffic considered by this rule, whether it matches or not. This
	is useful when debugging your rules.
	• Never – never log traffic considered by this rule, whether it matches or not.

Inbound Rules (Port Forwarding)

Because the FVX538 uses Network Address Translation (NAT), your network presents only one IP address to the Internet and outside users cannot directly address any of your local computers. However, by defining an inbound rule you can make a local server (for example, a Web server or game server) visible and available to the Internet. The rule tells the firewall to direct inbound traffic for a particular service to one local server based on the destination port number. This is also known as port forwarding.

Whether or not DHCP is enabled, how the PCs will access the server’s LAN address impacts the Inbound Rules. For example:

•If your external IP address is assigned dynamically by your ISP (DHCP enabled), the IP address may change periodically as the DHCP lease expires. Consider using Dyamic DNS (under Network Configuration) so that external users can always find your network (see “Configuring Dynamic DNS (If Needed)” on page 2-15.

•If the IP address of the local server PC is assigned by DHCP, it may change when the PC is rebooted. To avoid this, use the Reserved IP address feature in the LAN Groups menu (under Network Configuration) to keep the PC’s IP address constant (see “Setting Up Address Reservation” on page 3-9.

•Local PCs must access the local server using the PCs’ local LAN address. Attempts by local PCs to access the server using the external WAN IP address will fail.

Note: See “Port Triggering” on page 4-28for yet another way to allow certain types of inbound traffic that would otherwise be blocked by the firewall.

4-4 Firewall Protection and Content Filtering

v1.0, August 2006