Port Forwarding

[Hess]

Ever since I set up my wireless network 4 or 5 years ago I've never been able to successfully open ports. However, when my comp used to be directly hooked up to the modem it worked fine.

I've since tried many things to get ports open including disabling firewall and AVG, but obviously I'm missing something (probably something very simple). However, I doubt it is any software blocking ports because I can still host things within the network.

My setup is modem -> wireless router -> several computers. Each computer has its own static IP, which I specified when opening ports.

Modem: Speedtouch 530
Router: Belkin F5D7230-4

I've followed the port forwarding steps at here on both modem and router (they each have their own port forwarding settings).

I can successfully host things within the network, but outside the network its inaccessible.


Is there any way of troubleshooting the problem to find out what is preventing ports from being opened? Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated

[Janar]

Your ISP might have "Ports blocked" setting.
My ISP in Estonia had this, after opening ppl were able to connect.

[Gandalf]

There is a distinction between opening ports and forwarding.
 As a direct connection to the modem works,  the problem is not with the hoster. Double check this before going forward.

To allow a port to be reached, a setting to open the port in general is the first step. For games open it for UDP, for web traffic use TCP.

The second step is to let the router direct traffic to the correct IP of the hosting PC.
For this you need a setting in the router that directs an incoming port to a port of the IP.
This also allows you to override standard ports in case your provider would disallow certain ports to be used.

For instance for standard web traffic you should allow port 80 as TCP.
If the PC with IP 192.168.0.5 is used for hosting, enter this IP in the router setup with the ports is hosts on and the ports it should listen to.

Post a screenshot of you forward setup (or PM it)  if you need more details.

[Hess]

This is what I have currently.





I'll test to see if the direct connection to modem still works when I can (can't do that atm though, as it will disrupt my family's connections..:devroll:)
Post Merge: February 19, 2012, 12:49:12 pmHmm, realised the IP's in the second screenshot should be 192.168.2.1 (router's IP), but according to a port-checking site, port 80 is still "closed"...
Post Merge: February 20, 2012, 08:47:33 amWell, I finally managed to successfully forward port 80 through my complicated setup.

Story: I was sitting on the train when I decided to draw a map of my network set-up including all the IPs such as internal+external IPs of each modem/router (every router has an inside and external IP even it doesn't connect straight to the internet, which I found that hard way...). I realised when I drew the diagram that I didn't actually know the external IP of my router (the one that isn't directly going to internet) and was actually forwarding everything to the internal address of my router, which the modem is actually on the external side...

So anyway. When I got home I logged into my router and it displayed what is called the "WAN IP" which is the external IP of the router which was 10.0.0.1. I then typed that into the modem port settings as the inside address (refer to 2nd screenshot above).

Conclusion: The problem with following guides such as portforward.com is that they assume you only have a single router (which I guess a majority of people have), and so it asks you to type in the static IP of the computer to which the port is being forwarded to, but in my case for the modem the static IP instead had to be WAN IP of the router.