The Port Forwarding app is required if you plan to have publicly available servers running on your local network. For example, you may need use the port forward tool to send voice traffic to a PBX (phone system) running on your local network.
The ClearOS Port Forwarding module takes packets destined for a port on the ClearOS firewall's external IP and translates that to an internal IP address. If you wish to add additional public IP addresses and forward those ports you will want to use the 1 to 1 NAT app which takes care of the IP addressing, firewalling, and NAT translations in a simple way.
If your system does not have this app available, you can install it via the Marketplace.
You can find this feature in the menu system at the following location:
<navigation>Network|Firewall|Port Forwarding</navigation>
If you run servers behind your ClearOS gateway, you can use the Port Forwarding page to forward ports to a system on your local network. There are three ways to add a port forwarding firewall rule:
You can View, Add, Enable/Disable and Delete rules from this screen.
To add by Service, you just need to select the service you want to forward and the destination IP to forward to.
When forwarding by port you can specify a different port to forward to compared to the incoming port. If you do not specify a “To Port” the “From Port” is assumed. Choose the required Protocol (TCP or UDP) from the dropdown and fill up the rest of the fields (the “To Port” is optional).
You can forward range of ports to forward in a single rule, but in this case you do not get the opportunity to switch ports. Choose the required Protocol (TCP or UDP) from the dropdown and fill up the rest of the fields.
In order for port forwarding to work properly, the target system on your local network must have the default gateway set to ClearOS system.