Smoothwall & DDNS

[synaesthesia]

Slightly random one,

I need to allow access to a hostname which is a DDNS host, therefore the IP changes. Is it possible to add firewall rules based on the host rather than an ever changing IP?

[Joeloman]

Unfortunately not, but usually you can instead enter an IP range that their ISP uses.

Of course it depends on what you are going to open and for what if it is a good solution.

[synaesthesia]

Aye, nothing serious enough to warrant major investigation, so will leave it as "nope". I suspect that is the case as I remember the firewall side being iptables based.

Cheers

[MatthewL]

When creating your rule can you not specify the hostname rather than IP address? That way when hitting the policy it will look up the IP then, not familiar with Smoothwall but others such as Watchguard and pfSense both allow this.

[PaddyNewman]

You absolutely can fqdn in iptables, can do a hacky bit of scripting for ufw also but I'm janky.

 

I wouldn't say it's ideal though, and I imagine it won't work as expected for the majority. I've never found it great in iptables. Ufw however and a quick script to resolve and update the fw is easy.

[MatthewL]

So when creating a rule you have to specify an IP rather than FQDN when adding it, that seems a bit backwards. When I am working on firewalls I do everything via FQDN, very rare to list an IP unless its a range.

 

If I was you and as a Smoothwall user I'd be putting in a feature request to make your life easier!