Ebox firewall keeps locking me out

[toddratson]

I have been trying to get an ebox 1.2 install ready for production for 10 days now and I keep getting locked out by the firewall. This has happened on every one of 15 odd installs in a row. I am a 10 year veteran of OpenBSD and so I am comfortable at a command line via ssh but I am completely frustrated by this problem.

The server I am trying to configure is an HP proliant quad xeon with 2 network cards. I want the two cards to both have public ip's.

I have downloaded the Ebox 1.2 install iso. The install goes fine and I configure one of the two ethernet cards to it's fixed public ip. I select the ebox modules; firewall, mail, filtering, webserver, jabber, antivirus, dns. Ebox installs it's modules and finishes without error. I then log in via my laptop to both the https://myipaddress and ssh. No problem. I can ping it as well. I set both interfaces to external but I didn't give the second one an ip. I set Ebox to automatically update itself (and ubuntu I assume) save my settings, check that I can still login and go home.

The next day, I can't ping, no ssh and no http/s response. The only service that seems to answer is a dns query. When I login at the console all appears fine with no errors and all services running.

Since this is remote admin software I find it unfathomable that the firewall would be allowed to lock both ssh and http/s out on an update. I haven't been able to find anyone else with similar problems but I have followed the instructions to the letter.

This problem also hit me while building another server that I was testing on, an IBM e205 so I don't think it is a platform issue.

If anyone can shed some light on this I would be grateful! I am close to giving up on Ebox as my server is 30km from my house and I am getting sick of driving down there to fix it. I have not installed any additional software at all from the default install, nor did I change anything via ssh. Only the Ebox web gui was used. The only changes were to set auto updates and both ethernet cards to external. I save the settings and then test ssh and https. Next morning, no login. Every time.

I am going to visit my server today and I will hopefully get any information requested by the readership.

I am sure that the network card is ok, as the dns queries go through, just nothing else!?

[toddratson]

Update 1:

Does Ebox shut off the http/s and ssh ports when I set my interface to external? I am not familiar with ufw/ipchains in general as I have been using pf on OpenBSD until now. Can someone tell me how to hard code critical firewall rules to leave important ports open. I would need http, https and ssh to ensure I could fix any problems.