It seems that I have stumbled upon a interesting Check Point firewall NAT behavior. Namely the firewall does something that it is not ordered to do, it translates the source IP to a different one than in the policy.

Had a static inbound NAT rule where the source address of the client was supposed to be faked to another static address. What happened was that yes the policy installed fine. Yes the client IP address was changed and hidden from the service. But it was changed to an incorrect address. The rule stated that the client IP address be changed to for example 172.16.2.10, but what it was translated to was 172.16.2.100. And the new address did not exist anywhere in the policy database.

And after upgrading that particular management server to R80.20 it refused to compile the policy with that NAT rule in place. Fortunately recreating the NAT rule removed the issue.

The error in the FWM debug logs was for that issue:
“Invalid Object in Source of Address Translation Rule 57. The range size of Original and Translated columns must be the same.”

The interesting thing is, that it was fixed simply by deleting the rule and just re-adding it. And yes it was a 1 address to 1 address translation, not a network to 1 address.