Pfsense setting up port forwarding

I run a few test systems within my house and I want to have my pfsense port forward from my external IP address to my internal machines.

Here is how you do that in pfsense.

Other resources

A great video showing how to set this up properly has been done by Lawrence Systems https://youtu.be/3-DU47zDrQk [1]  I would suggest going and watching it !

My testing setup

I have a local test machine with nginx running on it.  I have the nginx setup to listen on port 8080.

So if I run a simple command like this from the box.

> curl localhost:8080/

I get a response

Also If I tail the logs I can see when it hit.

> tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log

Set up port forwarding

Now to set up

Got to Firewall à  NAT

Click Add to add a Port Forwarding rule.

For my simple case of forwarding port 80 on my WAN to port 8080 on my internal machine I can leave most of the top part with the Defaults.
I do need to set the Destination Port Range to from 80 to 80.

Enter in the IP you want the WAN to redirect to.

Set the Target Port.  Then give it a Description.  Finally Click Save.

Click Apply Changes

Now test it!

I have temporarily set the dns name http_test.whiteboarcoder.com to my External IP address.

I am going to log into an external machine and run a curl while I tail the access logs.

> curl http_test.whiteboardcoder.com

> tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log

There we go we are getting traffic into my network from an external source J

This is just a simple how to.  You can get far more advanced by setting up custom rules to limit who can access this port (for example from a single IP address)

References

[1]        How to Setup Port Forwarding on pfsense 2.4

https://youtu.be/3-DU47zDrQk
Accessed 12/2018