Unable to add orange (DMZ) interface

Iā€™ve created green, blue and red interfaces and firewall rules on my new NethServer gateway, but orange is creating an error. Iā€™m starting in Network and assigning an unused NIC to the role of orange. When I do, shorewall comes back with an error: Unknown source zone (orange) /etc/shorewall/rules line 36. I thought perhaps I should create an orange zone first, but when I try that it tells me that there is already a zone named ā€œorangā€.

Previously, I assigned a NIC to a role, then went in and created firewall rules for that particular interface. I wonder if there is some additional step for the DMZ? Any help would be appreciated.

1 Like

No additional steps needed. What you did seems correct to me. No need to create a zone. When you assign a role to a NIC a zone is ā€œcreatedā€ under the hood.
Iā€™m suspicious about the error ā€œUnknown source zone (orange) /etc/shorewall/rules line 36ā€ because zone names are limited to 5 chars.
Iā€™d start with:

grep -r orang /etc/shorewall/

You should find:

  1. zones:orang ipv4
  2. interfaces:orang eth2 dhcp,nosmurfs,routeback
  3. policy: many lines with accept or reject
  4. rules: a line for every defined rule

You could post the output of grep if you like.

Thanks for the quick response, Filippo. Before adding the orange NIC, I get no results at all with grep. After adding the NIC, I get a mix of ā€œorangeā€ and ā€œorangā€.

/etc/shorewall/policy:# Zone:orange
/etc/shorewall/rules: NFQBY orange net
NFQBY blue orange

The rules entries appear twice. Then, as you say, I also see zones:orang:ipv4, etc.

Here is the actual output of grep after adding the orange interface and grepping ā€œorangeā€:

/etc/shorewall/policy:# Zone: orange
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY orange net
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY blue orange
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY orange net
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY blue orange

I thought I might be able to edit /etc/shorewall/rules to change orange to orang, but the ā€œrulesā€ file gets restored back to this on a reboot, and perhaps when shorewall is restarted.

However, I just created a 2nd NethServer machine that doesnā€™t seem to have this problem, so perhaps the issue is some corruption in the installation Iā€™m working with. Iā€™ll keep playing and keep you posted.

1 Like

The problem seems to occur when I enable the IPS module. Prior to that, the orange interface is added without complaint. After enabling IPS, the following appears in /etc/shorewall/rules:

/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY orange net
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY blue orange
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY orange net
/etc/shorewall/rules:NFQBY blue orange

Since network objects are limited to 5 character names, the word ā€œorangeā€ blows up the firewall rules table. This seems to be a bug. Iā€™ll create a new post on the bugs category to report it.

This is a bug, thank you for reporting:
http://dev.nethserver.org/issues/3129

You will find the new rpm available tomorrow and ready for testing.

1 Like

@giacomo please could you reward @azchas with a like on the first post?
So I can close the topic :smile:

Done! (ā€œPost must be at least 10 charactersā€ AAARGH!!!)

1 Like