How To Port Forward Without Opening The Door To Hackers

Important for email or gaming servers

Port forwarding allows you to direct the traffic coming to a certain port on your router to your chosen device on your network. If you’re into any kind of servers such as email and gaming, you’ll want to learn how to port forward in order for these software to work on your machine.

If port forwarding isn’t enabled, the traffic for these servers will get stuck at your router and it won’t ever reach the desired device on your local network. With all the port forwarding tutorials available out there, it’s easy to set it up on your router no matter what router you have got.

While doing so, you’ll want to make sure that you set up port forwarding in such a way that it only allows certain IP addresses to access those ports. You don’t want just anyone on the Internet to be able to access your open ports.

Assign a Static IP Address To Your Device

Before you go ahead and enable port forwarding on your router, you’ll need toassign a static IP to your machine. It’s because when you forward a port, you need to specify the IP address of the device where the traffic should be routed to. This should be the device you want to receive traffic on.

While assigning an IP address to your computer, you want to make sure it’s a bit far away from your current IP address range. It’s because if you reboot your machines, your router may assign your chosen IP address to another device on your network which will cause an IP conflict on your system.

To be on the safe side, if your current IP address is192.168.1.105, assign something like192.168.1.140to your computer. This’ll prevent IP conflict.

How to Port Forward On Your Router

Now that your computer has a static IP assigned to it, you can go ahead and forward the ports using our how to port forward steps below.

The steps will slightly vary depending on the router you use. However, you should be able to find the options you need as they’ll have similar names.

Your chosen ports have now been forwarded to your specified IP address. Any traffic that is sent to those ports on your network will be routed directly to your LAN IP which is your computer.

The apps or software that asked you to port forward should now work without any issues.

Restrict IP Addresses From Using The Open Port

The ports you’ve forwarded can actually be accessed by anyone on the Internet. You want torestrict the accessso only certain allowed IP addresses can use those ports.

Make sure the rules are in order as you created them in the above steps.

The first rule will verify the IP address and only let it pass if it’s one of the IPs you have allowed. If the IP doesn’t match, the next rule will apply which blocks all the traffic to your specified port.

Mahesh has been obsessed with technology since he got his first gadget a decade or so ago. Over the last few years, he’s written a number of tech articles on various online publications including but not limited to MakeTechEasier and Android AppStorm.Read Mahesh’s Full Bio

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How To Port Forward Without Opening The Door To Hackers#

Assign a Static IP Address To Your Device#

How to Port Forward On Your Router#

Restrict IP Addresses From Using The Open Port#