After a soft-restart, port forwarding silently breaks for WAN traffic. The rule appears active in the panel, but incoming connections from the outside just time out.
This has recurred consistently across multiple soft-reload events over several months, with a different "ghost" IP each time (.100, .101, .102).
From the local network, however, I can always reach the client on its assigned static IP (.114) without any interruption. And here's the kicker: if I simply disable and re-enable the port forwarding rule from the router's interface, the problem vanishes instantly and external WAN access comes right back.
The weird part: during an outage, when I look at the router's own diagnostic tools, the ARP table and the NAT table completely contradict each other.
From the router's system logs:
DHCP is working correctly
16:34:35 — Client requests .101 16:34:35 — Router sends NAK, rejects it 16:34:35 — Client sends DISCOVER; router offers the reserved .114 16:34:35 — Client receives ACK for .114
Nginx proxy connects to the wrong IP 4 seconds after DHCP
16:34:39 — activated proxy [subdomain].keenetic.pro to http://192.168.1.101:80
Nginx "corrects" itself within 2 seconds
16:34:41 — activated proxy [subdomain].keenetic.pro to http://192.168.1.114:80
But nginx correcting itself does not stop incoming traffic from still being forwarded to the .101 ghost IP, as the CLI logs below show.
19:00:59 — CLI capture:
show ip neighbour:
id: 6 via: de:ad:be:ef:fe:01 address: 192.168.1.101 expired: yes ← INVALID
id: 7 via: de:ad:be:ef:fe:01 address: 192.168.1.114 expired: no ← VALID
show running-config | grep "ip static":
ip static tcp PPPoE0 80 de:ad:be:ef:fe:01
show ip nat – incoming WAN port 80 traffic:
TCP 172.71.102.232 13498 [WANIP] 80 4 192.168.1.101 80 172.71.102.232 13498 4
TCP 172.71.102.232 10776 [WANIP] 80 4 192.168.1.101 80 172.71.102.232 10776 4
At 19:00:59, incoming traffic is still being forwarded to the .101 ghost IP.
Question for the experts: Is this a client-side issue, or does it point to a bug in the router?