emerge works only if NAT port-forwarding is DISabled

[OdinsDream]

I have a wireless access point at home that serves as a NAT router to the computers in the house. I have one main gentoo system behind the router that serves webpages and other services. Other systems in the house are private.

I have each of the machines' ip addresses configured statically. The main server is 192.168.2.3

In order to get the web-server, and other services, visible from outside, I set up the NAT router to forward all ports to 192.168.2.3

With this setup, emerge rsync times out, and any other emerge operations time out. If, however, I turn off port-forwarding on the NAT router, emerge operates normally.

How can I fix this? What am I doing wrong?

[kram]

Maybe you should forward only the ports required for the services that you run, instead of forwarding all of them.

[rizzo]

Yeah you should only forward the ports for which those services are needed on those hosts. Like only forward port 80 to your webserver, etc.

[OdinsDream]

Unfortunately, the wireless base station doesn't give options to specify custom port forwarding. Only the standard services are available as options, with one of the options being "All ports"

Since I don't rely on my cheap base station router for security, and I run some services on uncommon ports, the only proper solution to make these services visible is to forward all ports.

My question, though, is not one of security, but more of functionality. Why is emerge having trouble in this situation? It doesn't seem like NAT is bothering portage, since my other machines can rsync fine (and indeed this machine, if all ports are not forwarded), but it does seem that this issue is related to forwarding all ports.

[ehudokai]

Unless this is a production server, can't you just turn off port forwarding while doing upgrades?

just a thought.

btw... what kind of error codes are you getting?

[OdinsDream]