Do I have to place the firewall rules in the Safepipe firewall rule table in a certain order?

Yes. It is very important to be aware of the order in which you place the rules in the firewall rule table on Safepipe. If your rules are placed in the wrong order, it may cause the firewall to accept packets which should have been blocked or simply to block all data traffic. There are two 'rules of thumb' when ranking firewall rules:

• Place specific rules before general rules: A specific rule could be a rule that allows access from the Internet to a particular device or service on your LAN. Such a rule must necessarily be placed before - that is, above - a rule which in general protects your LAN from being accessed from the Internet. If the order is reversed, the specific rule will not be acknowledged by the firewall, as the firewall has already found a match for the packet - a match that instructs the firewall to discard the packet without further notice.
• Keep track of rule 'pairs': Rule 'pairs' are sets of rules that have a common association with certain kinds of data packets, such as packets to or from a particular IP address or packets. A rule pair may, for instance, come about with the need to limit access to a single service on your LAN or on a subnet on your LAN. In this case, you need two rules - one that gives access to the particular service, and one that denies access to the rest of the LAN or subnet. Note that the access rule must be placed before the deny rule, as the deny rule will otherwise make the firewall overlook the access rule.You should also note that the same rule can be a part of several pairs. In these cases, it may be difficult but even more important to keep track of the right order.