Redundant "allow access to DHCPv6 server on LAN" rules

Started by ewb, January 08, 2026, 09:27:55 PM

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I have 2 installations on N150 hardware. Both started from the 25.7 community release but both are running 25.7.10 now.
This is a basic setup with Unbound forwarding to Dnsmasq for the local domain, no VPN or intrusion detection, a couple of custom firewall rules and aliases.  On my older install there are 23 Automatic LAN firewall rules including 8 to "allow access to DHCP server" of which 5 are for IPV6 UDP, and the other 3 encompass IPv4 also.

On my 2nd install which is substantially the same, I updated to 25.7.10 directly from the original release. Here I have these same 8 rules but also 5 others described as "allow access to DHCPv6 server on LAN." These do not have a help icon. These are listed *ahead* of the 8. These look identical to the 5 IPV6 UDP rules above. They are all quick rules so this probably doesn't matter functionally, but something seems fishy here.

I did get an "unexpected error" during the firmware update, but failed to see any details on that and I don't know how to go back and retrieve that log file. There is nothing in /var/log/pkg/latest.log about an error.

If I disable Dnsmasq, the 8 rules go away but the 5 redundant rules do not. Re-enabling Dnsmasq brings the 8 rules back.

Both installs seem to be working properly. The 1st is "in production" while I am just testing the 2nd one with one LAN side PC.

Is there a way to correct this?

Turns out that this problem was basically the same as discussed here (posted the next day):

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=48181.0

And I followed the workaround described there and voila, the extra 5 firewall rules went away.

The puzzling thing is why did my first setup never have this problem?  It has the IPv6 Configuration type set to None and always has AFAIK.

My suspicion is that the difference was that one was updated incrementally from 25.7 to 25.7.10 whereas this second setup was updated directly from release 25.7 to 25.7.10.