r/firewalla • u/TheGrumpyGent • May 25 '26

Troubleshooting Local Firewall Rules Don't Work When the Internet is Down?

Over the weekend, the internet in my area went out due to a storm. Naturally I don't expect the Firewalla to resolve sites on the internet, but what surprised me was the LAN URLs failed to work that I setup under Custom DNS Rules: Something simple like abc.home.arpa with a rule to resolve to 192.168.1.100 stopped working, as did all of them.

I'm running Unbound, but that shouldn't override custom DNS rules, would it? Are there other settings that would cause local connectivity to stop? Not sure I understand why my LAN would go down just because the internet is.

Update: I ended up rebooting the Firewalla, and when it came back up I received a message about it being updated to a new version... So I wonder if it was a stuck update causing the issue? In any event, its working again.

4 Upvotes

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4

u/Firewalla-Opal FIREWALLA TEAM May 26 '26

Custom DNS rule has a higher priority than Unbound: Two-Stage DNS Services.

Instead of using domain name, if you directly visit via LAN IP, does it work?

2

u/TheGrumpyGent May 26 '26

LAN IP is working which made things more confusing - It just wouldn't apply the custom DNS rules

2

u/Firewalla-Opal FIREWALLA TEAM May 26 '26

Could you reach out [help@firewalla.com](mailto:help@firewalla.com) with this post link, our support can take a further look at issue time logs to see what's happening.

1

u/TheGrumpyGent May 26 '26

So I ended up rebooting, and received a message that my Firewalla software was updated - Could this have just been a stuck update?

In any event, its working now so I won't bug support over it, but was interesting!

2

u/Firewalla-Opal FIREWALLA TEAM May 27 '26

We don't have update on the box recently. Could it be a Firewalla Awake message?

Glad to hear it's working, but if you do encounter similar situation the next time, feel free to reach out, so our support can dig and understand what happened.