I have a Solaris 11 machine running inside the LAN. It is a default install. I can access the machine and ping it if I ssh into my router (if it matters, it is running dd-wrt). I cannot ping the Solaris machine using ip address from any other machine inside the LAN.
But if I setup port forwarding everything works perfectly fine. I can also use the port forward from outside the LAN (from my office) – which is good and how I want it to be. I can SSH and ping and do pretty much everything else from outside as well as inside but only as long as I have the port forwarded from my router.
Why would I not be able to ping or ssh or even access the Solaris 11 machine from within the LAN – I have checked and couldn't find any firewall running on the Solaris 11 box. I even tried disabling every known firewall on the router (dd-wrt, it had something like SPI firewall running). I even tried setting a static IP for my Solaris box but all in vain! Please help me understand how and why this happens!!
Thanks.
Best Answer
How are you certain it is the Solaris box is responding when you ping from the outside?
Your router I'm assuming is a SOHO device, which means a WAN port and a 4-5 port switch for the LAN. When hosts connected to the LAN side need to talk to each other, they may go through the router's "hardware" but they talk to each other directly unless you've decided to carve that up into VLANs.
So... what I'm trying to say is, most like the problem is the firewall on the Solaris machine. I cannot explain why when you port forward SSH works, perhaps the firewall on the Solaris machine trusts the default gateway.