Regaining Access to the Administration User Interface After Creating an Access Rule to Block Traffic

If you've created a Smoothwall access rule to control traffic to internal services and have managed to lock yourself out of the administration user interface, you can regain access by deleting the Smoothwall access rule, but traffic to the Smoothwall web-based admin ports is blocked.

Procedure

To regain access, you need to connect to the appliance using an SSH session.

1. Connect to your appliance through a console using the SSH protocol on port 222. Typically, via an application such as Putty, for example, 192.168.110.1:222.
2. Log in as the root user.
3. Type setup and press ENTER.
4. Using the arrow keys, select Permit admin access.
5. Select an interface to use to regain access to the user interface. Choose one where the IP address is already known to you.
6. Confirm the new connection.
7. Exit from the setup menu.
8. A new section called Access rules added using the setup program is added that contains the Smoothwall access rule permitting access.
9. You can now connect to the administration user interface using the IP address of the selected interface and port 81 (use port 443 if using HTTPS communication).
   Tip: We recommend that you keep the new rule in place in case this happens again.