I have a Solaris 11 machine running inside the LAN. It is a default install. I can access the machine and ping it if I ssh into my router (if it matters, it is running dd-wrt). I cannot ping the Solaris machine using ip address from any other machine inside the LAN.

But if I setup port forwarding everything works perfectly fine. I can also use the port forward from outside the LAN (from my office) - which is good and how I want it to be. I can SSH and ping and do pretty much everything else from outside as well as inside but only as long as I have the port forwarded from my router.

Why would I not be able to ping or ssh or even access the Solaris 11 machine from within the LAN - I have checked and couldn't find any firewall running on the Solaris 11 box. I even tried disabling every known firewall on the router (dd-wrt, it had something like SPI firewall running). I even tried setting a static IP for my Solaris box but all in vain! Please help me understand how and why this happens!!

Thanks.