Smart Hub Plus - can you forward port 80?

[David-A-James]

I'm not quite sure what my EE Smart Hiub Plus is - the sticker on the bottom of it says SH32B, but in Hub Manager: Home > Advanced Settings > Technical Log > Information, the product code is shown as SH31B ...

Anyway, the question is: can you port forward port 80?

The answer appears to be no - I believe I have ports 80 and 81 both set to forward to port 80 on the same system:

When accessed internally (from the LAN side of the Smart Hub), port 81 goes to the 192.168.1.2 device (as hoped) but port 80 goes to the Smart Hub's own Hub Manager page.

When accessed externally (i.e. from something not on the internal network), port 81 goes to the 192.168.1.2 device (as hoped) and port 80 times out.

Is not being able to port forward port 80 the expected behaviour?

In case it is relevant, the hub's firmware version is r3.8.11-R-1414606-PROD-83002 with GUI version 2.36.9.

[XRaySpeX]

No. It is the port for the the router's own GUI.

[JimM11]

@David-A-James Also to determine what hub that you physically have then on the back of the Router if you see

1. DSL port RJ11 then you have the SH31B version connects to both services fttc and fttp.

2. NO DSL port is present you have the SH32B can only connect on a fttp service.

The software reporting of the hub version is just that and may not report it accurate but operation is fine!

[bobpullen]

@David-A-James - definitely possible and I doubt it's intended behaviour.

I have have port 80 forwarded to a wired device on my network, and can access it both on network and off. My traffic does route through a few proxies on the way though.

How are you trying to access these services when on/off your network? Via the server's internal IP address? External IP address? Some sort of domain name? How is that domain name configured? etc.

[David-A-James]

It doesn't have an RJ11 port, so it is an SH32B (as the sticker on the bottom of the hub says).

It would be nice if Hub Manager reported the "Product Code" correctly, but from many posts I read in this forum, the Smart Hub Plus's GUI is (shall we say) not particularly good ...

[David-A-James]

@XRaySpeX says you can't port forward port 80, @bobpullen says you can ..

I'm not entirely confident of my testing from outside the LAN - it should be OK, I'm using a 4G LTE router with a Three SIM in it for this test, but to be sure (and for a second set of eyes lookig at this) I have asked a friend to test from his home.

For both from within the LAN and externally, I am using a domain name home.x.y.z (where x.y.z is actually something sensible). That is being maintained at Amazon Route 53 (as a DNS A record that has the value of the external IPv4 address of the Smart Hub Plus) by code running on a server within my LAN (the code checks for change of external IPv4 address every 15 minutes and updates Amazon Route 53 if the external IPv4 address has changed).

[XRaySpeX]

If @bobpullen says it can be done, it can!

Using a mobile router in your home as the remote node should be sufficient.

[David-A-James]

I should have said: @bobpullen says he has some reverse proxies.

I have Cloudflare in the path, but apart from that only the port forwarding rules in my first posting.

I think I am seeing different behaviour for the forwarding of port 80 and of port 81 which should both be forwarding to port 80 on the same server on my LAN.

But I'll wait until my friend has made some tests for me and then update this thread.

[bobpullen]

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@David-A-James wrote:

I should have said: @bobpullen says he has some reverse proxies.

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This is how I have things set up: -

• DNS for my domains is hosted by Cloudflare
• Local dynamic DNS client (ddclient) running on a Raspberry Pi on my network that is updating one of the domains with my EE public IP (similar to what you're doing with Amazon Route 53 by the sounds of things)
• My server subdomains are aliased to my Dynamic DNS domain in DNS
• Port forwarding on my EE hub is translating external 80 to internal 80 at a 192.168.1.0/24 address (I've used SH30A, SH31B and SH40J over time - not SH32B, but firmware should be common across the SH3x devices as far as I know)
• Traffic to my server domains goes through Cloudflare's proxies (similar to what you're doing by the sounds of things)
• Once the traffic hits my hub, it is forwarded to a Caddy reverse proxy server on my local network using the port forwarding rule
• Caddy then forwards the traffic across the LAN to the appropriate server, using a unique port that isn't 80

As mentioned, for SH3x, I have no issues accessing any of my servers using their 'proper' domain names whether I am on or off my local network. The only slight issue I have encountered is with the SH40J, where attempts to access the servers from the LAN seem to fail if the source device is connected to the extender and not the hub and I disable the Cloudflare proxying (which I'm putting down to a firmware bug).

Seems a pretty similar setup to yours, give or take. The only differences I can think of are the absence of the local reverse proxy in your case (which shouldn't have much bearing as it's after the port forwarding rule has done its stuff) and the fact that you have multiple rules on your hub that all point to the same internal port (I only have one).

Are your 80 and 81 rules both accessed using the same domain name, or is it different?

[David-A-James]

@bobpullen Thank you, that's all useful information.

I've now had a firend test from a different location and he reports the same thing that I am seeing: the port forwarding rules for ports 81 and 82 both work (as do two further rules for different (non-standrad) ports which are going to different local devices) but HTTP connections to port 80 just time out.

I agree that the local reverse proxy shouldn't matter as it is after the port forwarding should have taken effect.

I could try removing the rule for port 81 and see if the port 80 rule then works.

I am accessing port 80 and port 81 using the same domain name (which, via Cludflare, gets to the external IPv4 address of the Smart Hub Plus).

It is still possible that I have something wrongly configured on the 192.168.1.2 device (to which both port 80 and port 81 forward), but I think that is unlikely as the rules for both port 80 and port 81 forward to port 80 on the 192.168.1.2 device (and port 81 works, whilst port 80 doesn't).

The only reason I had port 80 on the 192.168.1.2 device exposed to the Internet was for a check at Pingdom.com - I eventually realised that I can set a different port in an HTTP check at Pingdom, so I switched that check to use port 81 and Pingdom is now happily again monitoring the up state of the 192.168.1.2 device (and hence also my broadband connection).

So whilst I no longer need it, it's still an irritating niggle that I can't get the forwarding of port 80 to work.