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How to Forward Ports on Your Router

Some games and programs only work if you open a speci ic port

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Icons by Dryicons (Router and Network)

by Tim Fisher 53
Updated April 15, 2019

You need to open ports on your router for some video games and programs to work properly. Although your router has some
ports open by default, most are closed and only usable if you manually open them.

If your online video games, ile server, or other networking programs aren’t working, you need to access your router and open
the speci ic ports that the application needs.

What Is Port Forwarding?

All the tra ic that passes through your router does so through ports. Every port is like a special pipe made for a speci ic kind
of tra ic. When you open a port on a router, it allows a particular data type to move through the router.

The act of opening a port, and choosing a device on the network to forward those requests to, is called port forwarding. You
can think of port forwarding like attaching a pipe from the router to the device that needs to use the port — there's a direct
line-of-sight between the two that allows data low.

For example, FTP servers listen for incoming connections on port 21. If you have an FTP server set up that nobody outside
your network can connect to, you'd want to open port 21 on the router and forward it to the computer you're using as the
server. When you do this, that new, dedicated pipe is used to move iles from the server, through the router, and out of the
network to the FTP client that's communicating with it.
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The same is true for other scenarios like video games that need the internet to communicate with other players, torrent
clients that require speci ic ports to be open for uploading iles, instant messaging applications that can only send and
receive messages through a very speci ic port, and others.

Absolutely every networking application needs a port to run on, so if a program or application isn’t working when everything
else is otherwise set up correctly, you might need to open the port on your router and forward requests to the right device
(e.g., a computer, printer, or game console).

Port range forwarding is similar to port forwarding but is for forwarding an entire range of ports. A certain video game might
use ports 3478-3480, for example, so instead of typing all three into the router as separate port forwards, you could just
forward that whole range to the computer running that game.

Note: Below are two primary steps you need to complete to forward ports on your router. Because every device is
different, and because there are so many router variations out there, these steps are not necessarily speci ic to any
one device. If you need additional help, refer to the user manual for the device in question, for example, the user
guide for your router.

Give the Device a Static IP Address

The device that will be bene iting from the port forward needs to have a static IP address. This is necessary so that you don’t
have to keep changing the port forwarding settings each time it obtains a new IP address.

For example, if your computer will be the one running torrenting software, you’ll want to assign a static IP address to that
computer. If your gaming console needs to use a speci ic range of ports, it will need a static IP address.

There are two ways to do this: from the router and from the computer. If you’re setting up a static IP address for your
computer, it’s easier to do it there.

To set up a Windows computer to use a static IP address, you have to ist identify which IP address it's using right now.
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01 Open Command Prompt on the computer.

02 Type this command and then press Enter:

ipconfig /all

03 Record the following: IPv4 Address, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway, and DNS Servers.

Tip: If you see more than one IPv4 Address entry, look for the one under a heading like “Ethernet adapter Local
Area Connection,” “Ethernet adapter Ethernet” or “Ethernet LAN adapter Wi-Fi.”. You can ignore anything else, like
Bluetooth, VMware, VirtualBox, and other non-default entries.

Now, you can use that information to actually set up the static IP address.
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01 From the Run dialog box (WIN+R), open Network Connections with the ncpa.cpl command.

02 Right-click or tap-and-hold the connection that’s the same name as the one you identi ied in Command Prompt. In our
example above, we’d choose Ethernet0.

03 Select Properties from the menu.

04 Pick Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) from the list and choose Properties.

05 Select Use the following IP address.

06 Enter all the same details you copied from Command Prompt — the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS
servers.

07 Choose OK when you’re done.

Important: If you have several devices on your network that get IP addresses from DHCP, don't reserve the same IP
address you found in Command Prompt. For example, if DHCP is set up to serve addresses from a pool between
192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.20, con igure the IP address to use a static IP address that falls outside of that range to
avoid address con licts. You could use 192.168.1.21 or above in this example. If you're not sure what this means, just
add 10 or 20 to the last digit in your IP address and use that as the static IP in Windows.

You can also set up your Mac to use a static IP address, as well as Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

Another option is to use the router to set up a static IP address. You might do this if you need a non-computer device to have
an unchanging address (like a gaming console or a printer).
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01 Access the router as admin.

02 Locate a "Client List," “DHCP Pool," "DHCP Reservation," or similar section of the settings. The idea is to ind a list of
devices currently connected to the router. The IP address of the device in question will be listed along with its name. 

03 There should be a way to reserve one of those IP addresses to tie it with that device so that the router will always use it
when the device requests an IP address. You might need to select the IP address from a list or choose "Add" or
"Reserve."

The above steps are very generic since static IP address assignment is different for every router, printer, and gaming device.
Follow these links for speci ic instructions on reserving IP addresses on these devices: NETGEAR, Google, Linksys, Xbox One,
PlayStation 4, Canon printer.

Set Up Port Forwarding

Now that you know the device’s IP address and have con igured it to stop changing, you can access your router and set up
the port forwarding settings.

01 Log in to your router as admin. This requires you to know the router’s IP address, username, and password. Follow
those links if you’re not sure how to do that.

02 Locate the port forwarding options. They’re different for every router but might be called something like Port
Forwarding, Port Triggering, Applications & Gaming, or Port Range Forwarding. They might be buried within other
categories of settings like Network, Wireless, or Advanced.

03 Type the port number or port range that you want to forward. If you’re forwarding just one port, type the same number
under both the Internal and External boxes. For port ranges, use the Start and End boxes.

Most games and programs will tell you exactly which ports you need to open on the router, but if you don’t know what
numbers to type here, PortForward.com has a huge list of common ports.

04 Pick the protocol, either TCP or UDP. You can also choose both if you need to. This information should also be available
from the program or game that explains the port number.

05 If asked, name the port trigger anything that makes sense to you. If it’s for an FTP program, call it FTP, or Medal of
Honor if you need the port open for that game. It doesn’t matter what you name it because it’s just for your own
reference.

06 Type the static IP address you've decided on.

07 Enable the port forwarding rule with an Enable or On option. 

Here's an example of what it looks like to forward ports on a Linksys WRT610N:

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Some routers might put you through a port forward setup wizard that makes it easier to con igure. For example, the router
might irst give you a list of devices already using a static IP address and then let you pick the protocol and port number from
there.

Here are some other port forwarding instructions that are more speci ic to these brands of routers: D-Link, NETGEAR, TP-Link,
Belkin, Google, Linksys.

More on Open Ports

If forwarding a port on your router doesn’t allow the program or game to work on your computer, you might need to check
that the irewall program hasn’t blocked the port, too. The same port needs to be open on the router and your computer in
order for the application to use it.
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Tip: To see if the Windows Firewall is to blame for blocking a port that you’ve already opened on your router,
temporarily disable the irewall and then test the port again. If the port is closed on the irewall, you’ll need to edit
some settings to open it.

When you open a port on your router, tra ic can now low in and out of it. This means if you were to scan your network for
open ports, you should see everything that’s open from the outside. There are websites and tools build speci ically for this.

You might check if a port is open if you want to avoid having to get into your router to check, or maybe you’ve already
followed the steps above but the program or game still isn’t working, and you want to check that the port was opened
correctly. Another reason is to do the opposite: make sure a port you’ve closed is actually closed.
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Regardless of what you’re doing it for, there are several places to ind a free open port checker. PortChecker.co and
NetworkAppers both have online port checkers that can scan your network from the outside, and Advanced Port Scanner and
FreePortScanner are useful for scanning other devices within your private network.

Only one port forward can exist for every instance of that port. For example, if you forward port 3389 (used by the Remote
Desktop remote access program) to a computer with the IP address 192.168.1.115, that same router can't also forward port
3389 to 192.168.1.120.

In cases like this, the only solution, if possible, is to change the port the program is using, something that might be possible
from within the software's settings or through a registry hack. In the RDP example, if you edited the Windows Registry on the
192.168.1.120 computer to force Remote Desktop to use a different port like 3390, you could set up a new port forward for that
port and effectively use Remote Desktop on two computers within the same network.

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