Have you opened the ports on your router to a server, PC or console and it does not work correctly? Today we are going to explain to you how to check open ports on your router easily. But first, we have to talk about some fundamental terms to understand why port forwarding works or does not work. We will do it in a simple way by explaining the difference between a public and private IP.
All home routers use NAT. When a computer on the LAN tries to access the Internet, NAT is responsible for translating the addresses and making use of the TCP / UDP ports without the need to do anything. However, if the communication starts on the Internet to the LAN, it is necessary to open a port to redirect the packets correctly to their destination.
Differences between public IP and private IP
We could define an IP as a logical and unique identifier for each of the computers connected to a network. You can find that these addresses are normally put in dotted decimal notation. Regarding IPs, we could say that there are two classes – Public IP, and Private IP. The public IP is the identifier of our network for the Internet. It is impossible to put a public IP on your own. In this case it is your service provider that assigns you one, either statically or dynamically. Also within the public IP we have two categories – the static public IP, and the dynamic public IP. Currently the vast majority have a dynamic public IP. The static IP is usually used by companies to set up their servers. As for the private IP, it is the one that identifies each of the devices connected to our network. In this sense, it is the router that acts as a gateway to communicate with the outside world.
Check open ports on your router
If you are going to configure a server for something in your local network, you need to open ports. For these actions to be performed, you may need a port check –
- Set up an FTP server,
- Set up a VPN server,
- Configure an SSH server,
- Set up a mail server,
- Private cloud to synchronize files or folders,
- Connecting a game server and play online,
- Download through peer-to-peer file sharing application,
- If you are going to download by Bit Torrent.
Once we have all the concepts clear, it is time to check the open ports on your router. To do this, you mainly have two options. The first of them and the easiest is using a Port Checker website to check that our ports are open. Once you have entered, you will simply have to put your public IP address, and put the port (s) that you want to check. This tool allows you to check port ranges and also ports separated by commas. On the other hand, you always have the possibility of Android network apps.