pfSense

That behavior was changed by https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commit/9060f420a9444c68fc8db926787d0bb37d77ed72
Not sure if it was intentional to remove the ability to directly type a port range in that field - one of the devs can comment on that.

Thanks for the head-up. It seem to be to fix bug #3857. I concur that the edit box is a single port entry, and should probably be validated the same as other single-ports edit boxes throughout the firewall. The validator is probably the same for other port edit boxes, and the firewall may have assumption elsewhere.

The devs can probably comment on that but I tend to be in favor of the new validation (to stay consistent with single-port vs port range GUI elements). If we wish to have port ranges entered directly, we could have multiple edit boxes/combo, like for the port forwarding port ranges.

One note, it is to be noted that this does NOT seem to break update, nor backup/restore. I.e. on upgrade, from 2.1.5, the rules were kept as is. I was also able to restore a config in which I had the port range directly set for this field. So that's a good thing! But further editing of the "legacy" rule will whine until the port is set using an alias.

In the meantime, that field may also be left blank so that it affects all ports, not only that specific range.

Applied in changeset commit:340e8bc5cf67a2e826df28d1ac3a1eb70ed2c5c5.