No internet access from clients behind my freedom box router

Problem Description
I am trying to set up my freedom box as a router. When I plug in my freedom box to the lan and connection clients, they do not see the internet or the freedom box.
dhcp doesnt work and if I manually configure the network it doesnt see the internet or freedom box
The lan is configured to share in plynth.
The Wan is connected and I can install software with apt
I can’t change the plynth network settings without a graphical browser, the change fails to save, but I can log in and look at the settings with links from the console.

Steps to Reproduce
plug the freedom box in to the lan
plug another computer in to the lan and browse the duckduckgo, or freedombox

Expected Results
I expected to see the duckduckgo home page or freedombox

Actual results
Instead, I see an error that the network does not have internet access.

Screenshot
not sure how this would help

Information

  • FreedomBox version: 23.5
  • Hardware: rockpro64
  • How did you install FreedomBox?: burned an image from freedombox into the emmc after upgrading the onboard boot software as directed in my previous question.

I’m not using mine in this fashion but a couple questions come to mind to help out those who might know better.

From the hip, my first guess is that you are likely misconfigured.
I’m thinking you are not in the internal mode at the moment in order to set/configure the FB to act as a router while only having one network interface. Please see below quote from manual part 6, section 11.2. Internet Connection Sharing

Sometimes the above setup may not be possible because the hardware device may have only one network interface or for other reasons. Even in this case, your machine can still connect to the Internet via FreedomBox. For this to work, make sure that the network interface that your machine is connecting to is in internal mode. Then, connect your machine to network in which FreedomBox is present. After this, in your machine’s network configuration, set FreedomBox’s IP address as the gateway. FreedomBox will then accept your network traffic from your machine and send it over to the Internet. This works because network interfaces in internal mode are configured to masquerade packets from local machines to the Internet and receive packets from Internet and forward them back to local machines.

https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual#FreedomBox.2FManual.2FNetworks.Networks

In so far as how to set this change from command line, I don’t know. Perhaps someone more advanced can advise if my supposition is on the right track and how to resolve it.

I reinstalled the lastest version. The network is configured to be shared. DHCP is giving out an address.
Now I can access the freedombox from inside and from outside.
I can ping google and my laptop from the freedombox.
I can ping the freedombox from the laptop.

Still no internet access for the laptop plugged in to the internal network, though.
I cant ping google from the laptop.
ping returns destination unreachable.

I added the int_to_ext_fwd policy from

that seems to have fixed things