How to Open Ports - Draytek

Disclaimer: While this guide provides general steps, the exact interface and options might vary slightly depending on your router's firmware version.

Understanding Open Ports 

Before we begin, it's important to understand what an open port is. When you open a port, you're essentially telling your router to direct incoming traffic on a specific port to a particular device on your internal network. This is often required for services like VoIP, remote access, or running a server.

Prerequisites

Before we go through how to open a port on a Draytek, you need the following: 

• The device needs a statically assigned internal IP
• The school needs a network range on the panel. This can be found on your Connectivity asset under ‘Customer Network’
• If you haven't set an IP alias, please follow our How to access router guide

Steps to Open a Port on Drayteks

After making an IP address available to use, we need to configure the open port rule. This can be done by selecting NAT from the left hand side menu, and under NAT, there will be a section called Open Ports. Select this. 

On the next page, you will see a table of rules. Select the next free one 

In this example, this is the first Open Port on this router, so we would select Index 1

Once selected, you will see: 

This is where we would configure the rule. 

Click on the ‘Enable Open Ports’ box and add the following information.

Comment: The name of the rule, e.g. CCTV or the IP, e.g 192.168.1.10 

WAN Interface: Select the WAN Interface you're using (in this example, WAN1)

Source IP: This is restricting the rule from external access so it will only allow specific external IPs that have been configured to have access.Its best practice to source restrict rules as this avoids hackers from scanning open ports on your network and attempting to get in. 

Private IP: The internal IP address of the device you want to allow the traffic to.

Ports and Protocols: Add the relevant port information into the protocol box, TCP/UDP, TCP, or UDP, followed by the port. If this is one port, you put the number in both the Start and End boxes.

Click OK to save the changes. 

The rule is set up.