How to check if Safepipe is receiving a ping request

Introduction

You may wish to check ping requests on Safepipe for one of these purposes:

• To check the connection to Safepipe.
  
  The 'ping' command is a useful tool when identifying connection problems. However, in some configurations, you may be reliant on the configuration of other devices (such as a NAT router between Safepipe and the Internet) to route ping responses correctly. In these circumstances, it can be useful to know if Safepipe is actually receiving a ping request.

• To check if an intruder is trying to access your VPN by pinging your network.

To achieve this, you need to add a firewall rule, which will enable logging of all ping requests on Safepipe.

Note: Logging of all ping requests should only be enabled for a short period. The reason is that overall Safepipe performance will be reduced, when you enable logging on specific firewall rules.

Procedure

1. On Safepipe's management interface, click 'Network' > 'Firewall'.
   
        

2. Create a new firewall rule.
   
   For explicit help on configuring a firewall rule, see the guide How to configure a new firewall rule on Safepipe.

3. Modify the new rule as follows:
   
   

4. Press the 'Apply Changes' button.
   
   

5. To view the log, click the 'Log' tab in the 'Firewall' section.
   
   In the below example you see that four ping requests from the sender '192.168.2.2' were received on Safepipe's private interface '192.168.2.1':
   
   
   

   Annotation:
   SPIN ACCEPT	The firewall rule action 'Accept'
   eth0	Internal name for the Ethernet 1 / LAN1 interface
   PROTO=1	The ICMP protocol (Protocol 1)
   192.168.2.2:8	The sender IP address and port number
   192.168.2.1:0	The receiver IP address and port number

   
   

6. It is recommended that you disable the new rule, once you have checked the log.