psherman December 17, 2024, 7:33am 6

set 'Forward' to 'drop' in the general settings and zones,

There is a common misunderstanding of the meaning of forward in the zone settings.

The zone level forward rule controls forwarding between two or more networks that are in the same firewall zone. This is intra-zoneforwarding. If that is set to accept, it will allow those networks to communicate with each other unless there are any other rules filtering/prohibiting those connections. Likewise, drop or reject will prevent the networks from communicating unless other rules allow it.

The general settings works the same way but only for networks that are not assigned to a firewall zone.

This is different than the forwarding rules that you see between zones (inter-zone) such as the lan > wan forwarding that is part of the default firewall config.