One of our machines that has been running ESET Smart Security premium 16.x for almost 3 months with no modifications to settings, failed to allow inbound web traffic this morning (inbound requests to ports 80 or 443). I am very experienced with iptables, but not familiar with the ESET firewall. I added a rule in an attempt to remedy the situation, and it had no effect, so I turned off the ESET firewall off to allow the web server internet access (Apache for windows running a non-profit website). Wireshark traces showed that with the ESET firewall turned on, all remote and local inbound web requests were blocked.
With iptables you can place rules anywhere you want in a chain, as the order of rule evaluation is extremely important with firewalls, but I couldn't find a way to do that with ESET, so my rule got added to the bottom of the list. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Note that there are no other firewalls running on the machine at the time this change in ESET firewall behavior occurred. Thanks in advance.