What is my RAX54 WiFi router connecting to at TCP port 8883?

[galmiklos]

I just set up my RAX54 WiFi router in AP Mode, and it is an OPNSense firewall behind it.

Apart from the annoying ICMP attempts to Google DNS servers (which I believe is a bad practice to check if we are on-line), I can see my router is trying to connect to various servers at TCP port 8883.

At the same time, I can see an error message in NTP Settings.

Could that "default NETGEAR NTP server" be what the router is trying to connect to, at a non standard port? Standard NTP would be UDP 123 and UDP port 123 is open on my firewall, why would the NETGEAR NTP server be not accessible?

If there is no correlation between the two, I still would like to know what my router is connecting to at TCP 8883, and why the NETGEAR NTP server is not accessible.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[michaelkenward]

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@galmiklos wrote:

I just set up my RAX54 WiFi router in AP Mode, and it is an OPNSense firewall behind it.

First, did you find this?

Disabled Features on the Router when set to AP Mode | Answer | NETGEAR Support

Could that affect what you are trying to do?

[galmiklos]

All those features disabled because of selecting AP mode I expected. I would want my firewall do most of that, and it does.

However, after changing the NTP settings to my own NTP server (the firewall), the router stopped trying to connect to those addresses at TCP port 8883.

So it seems, that "default NETGEAR NTP server" is not a standard NTP server, but some NETGEAR proprietary solution to sync time.

[FURRYe38]

What happens if you set your firewall to allow the RAX NTP query to pass thru out of curiosity? 
Yes NG has a NTP service on there side. As do other router Mfrs. 

[galmiklos]

This is odd. I enabled the NETGEAR NTP server, and it works now, although I did not change anything on the firewall.

And I don't see connection attempts to TCP port 8883 either.