Open a port in ubuntu 17.10 for dosbox

Question

I am trying to open a port in Ubuntu 17.10, but first some background.

For the last 16 hours I've been working on getting a BBS mailer set up under dosbox. In my dosbox conf, I have set up "serial1=modem listenport:601" to listen on port 601. To test this, I was able to open a terminal and do "telnet localhost 601" and I could connect everytime. The moment I try to open the port in iptables and in ufw (I found out how from stack exchange) now the port seems to be closed and dosbox reports "Serial1: Modem could not open TCP port 601."

But this worked all day until I opened the ports.

Here is what iptables and ufw are reporting:

iptables -L | grep 601

ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:601

ACCEPT udp -- anywhere anywhere udp dpt:601

ufw status Status: active

To Action From -- ------ ---- 601 ALLOW Anywhere
601 (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)

So my question is two-fold:

1) why did this work before I opened the port but now won't work when the port is open? 2) How do I make it work?

My end goal is to be able to access the BBS mailer from outside my network, but for now I just need to test locally with ports open. (after this, my next step is to get a dynamic dns so I can begin testing from outside the network)

Answer 1

By using UFW you don't need to take care of iptables. UFW will to this for you.

So here's one possible explanation what could have happened:

• UFW was not active at the time when testing with telnet.
• Then you started UFW and the default ufw rule is deny or drop incoming traffic.
• Then you've opened the port 601 for udp/tcp, but only for IPv6 by accident.
• Now telnet does not work anymore, as you connect via IPv4 and your connection get's dropped/denied according to your ufw settings.

But it's not that important to find out why it did work before. More important is to make it work again, I guess. You can do so, by adding the correct UFW rules:

sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 601

And then check ufw settings with:

 sudo ufw status verbose

The output from this command should look like this, for example:

Status: active
Logging: on (low)
Default: deny (incoming), allow (outgoing), disabled (routed)
New profiles: skip

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
601/tcp                    ALLOW IN    Anywhere
601/tcp (v6)               ALLOW IN    Anywhere (v6)

Then it should work again.