Edit 2: 31/10/18
If you’re having problems and you’re still on an older shibby, irateb provided the following suggestion:
“there’s a setting in Tomato called Cut Through Forwarding (CTF) that was enabled in Advanced > Miscellaneous. That setting supposedly gives a slight performance boost by bypassing some of the protocol overhead, but not without some consequences, one of which being port forwarding not working. Turning off CTF allowed port forwarding to work for me.”
Edit 15/11/17: this issue has been reported to have been fixed in shibby build 140.
https://github.com/Jackysi/advancedtomato/issues/284
Just quick quirk I learned today: if you’re having issues with port forwarding or UPNP not working on Advanced Tomato or Tomato Shibby firmware, and you are connecting to a bridged DSL modem over PPPoE, check that “Use DHCP” is OFF under “WAN settings on the “Basic Settings” page. DHCP needs to still be on for the LAN section, but having it on under the WAN settings was blocking all port forwarding, DMZ, and UPNP from working.
Its really impressively comprehensive firmware, far better than the stock Netgear R7000 firmware, but there’s definitely a few quirks here and there. Some people have even reported other weird behavior with port forwarding here and elsewhere.
If I’d known about this, it might have saved me $45 buying a new modem thinking that my bridging wasn’t working correctly. It was only when I did a factory reset, that I realised the actual cause – basic troubleshooting 101, doh!
Thank you. I was having this same issue and was pulling my hair out
Very glad to hear it helped! 😀
Thanks, mate! This saved me a while back 🙂
This also resolved my 2 month old problem… Also explains why my status screen said “Connecting…” yet was connected.
I can’t connect at all if I uncheck “USE DHCP”. Is there any way around this? How do we statically define the WAN IP parameters?
Unfortunately if you are using PPP to a bridged modem, you are either assigned a static or dynamic ip by your ISP choice. You don’t usually have any control over that.
In which case, do you know to get port forwarding working?
I used to have it working before Shibby reworked parts of this firmware more substantially earlier last year.
I don’t understand your setup – can you explain how you have things configured, and what settings you have changed from default? Whatever your setup, still turn OFF the wan DHCP, that was the point of this article. Keep DHCP on for the LAN side however.
I have a ISP-supplied rooter in bridge mode.
My Tomato router is attached to this (via the WAN port) and connects using PPPoA.
From default, I’ve added the PPPoA details. I’ve set up port forwarding.
If I untick “Use DHCP” under “Wan settings” then the internet doesn’t work.
Under “LAN”, DHCP is “Enabled” as it always has been by default.
If my understanding is correct, you should not need Wan dhcp. Try to backup your tomato configuration then reset to factory settings. Then, try setting up pppoa again without changing the default dhcp wan setting (off) and see if it works for you. If not, you might want to double check you have bridge mode setup correctly.
You definitely need LAN DHCP on.
I tried this. The first time it rendered the router inaccessible through wireless or wired and I had to do a factory settings reset.
I’ve tried leaving off DHCP and it doesn’t allow me online. I believe bridge is setup correctly, because it’s worked before with a number of different firmwares and routers in the past (inc. with port forwarding).
Thanks for your help, but I think that since MultiWAN was added to this firmware that it’s not suitable for my particular setup. This perhaps explains the big gap between releases.
I think I’m going to try Merlin instead as it seems less ambitious.
Good luck, sorry I can’t help more. Which model router and modems out of interest? I had good luck with gargoyle firmware too.
My router is an Asus RT-AC68U. My modem is a cheap Thompson DSL router set into bridge mode.
Cheers for the tip.
AdvancedTomato firmware upgrade a few weeks back, coincidentally a few weeks back all port forwarding died.
This fixed it.
As someone else said, the “Connecting…” status message has also finally vanished from the Status page.
Thanks for the tip.
It’s a frustrating bug, I wish shibby or someone would fix it!
Upgraded to a new router and reinstalled Tomato, could not for the life of me figure out why I could not get to my server from external!!
Indeed this also fixed the bug I was having where it would always say “Renewing…” on the status.
Hooray!
Hooray! Such a frustrating issue!
I just did this, and sure enough, lost internet. This can’t be done – but there is definitely a bug within the shibby firmware as I have been trying to get port forwarding working working for about 10 hours now! Not in a row though. I know everything, and more, is configured correctly. It’s just not working
Sorry for the slow reply – my only suggestion would be to backup your config, and start from scratch just trying to figure out how to get port forwarding, and then put back your old settings one by one, until you find what is breaking things. That’s what I had to do to find this bug.
Hi,
do you know if this problem is still in Shibys build 140?
I seem to have that exact problem.
But I can’t change away from WAN-DHCP, as my provider only works this way – Cable-Internet.
Is there any fix?
Hi,
I’m not sure if the problem still exists – but I would expect it does. I never heard any reply when I mentioned the problem. 🙁 I am sorry that I am also not familiar with cable modems. How is your cable modem setup? Ideally you would like to be able to set it to bridge mode, and then use PPPoE. I found that my internet with PPPoE worked fine with DHCP turned off on the WAN side.
Super late reply, but just wanted to post in case someone like me is having this issue and can’t find an answer. I have Tomato by Shibby 1.28 on a Linksys ea6900 and a Surfboard SB6183 cable modem. I too couldn’t get port forwarding to work and turning off DHCP was not an option for me with my cable modem, but there was a setting in Tomato called Cut Through Forwarding (CTF) that was enabled in Advanced > Miscellaneous. That setting supposedly gives a slight performance boost by bypassing some of the protocol overhead, but not without some consequences, one of which being port forwarding not working. Turning off CTF allowed port forwarding to work for me.
That’s really helpful to know – Hopefully that helps someone!! Cheers, Sam
Thanks for this info, it saved me a lot of hassle trying to debug an issue I was having with NAT loopback not working on my R7000 running Tomato Advanced with CTF turned on.
For what it’s worth, it does NOT appear to have been fixed under the shibby build 140 that my Advanced Tomato firmware has.
The only way I could get NAT loopback to work was to disable CTF.
Thanks a lot for this hint.
I was already really desperated…