How to set up Port Redirection - Draytek

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

Understanding the difference between Open Ports and Port Redirection: 

On DrayTek routers, the concepts of open ports and port redirection (port forwarding) are both part of the firewall/NAT configuration, but they are handled and used differently.

Open Ports refer to firewall rules that allow traffic through a specific port to the router itself or to the LAN. On DrayTek, open ports aren't automatically open — you typically need to create a firewall rule that allows traffic unless it’s handled by NAT/port forwarding. An example of this is: 

Opening port 443 for 192.168.1.10 and needing a public IP. 

Port Forwarding is when you take incoming traffic on a specific WAN port and forward it to a device inside your LAN on a specific LAN Port. These can be different. An example of this is: 

Opening external port 8456 on an external IP, which forwards it to 443 on 192.168.1.10. The public port differs from the Private port, and that's the key difference between the two. 

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 set up Port redirections on Drayteks

After making an IP address available to use, we need to configure the port redirection rule. This can be done by selecting NAT from the left-hand side menu, and under NAT, there will be a section called Port Redirection. 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 Port Redirection 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’ box and add the following information.

Mode: Choose "Single" for forwarding a single port or "Range" for a range of ports.

Service Name: A descriptive name for the rule (e.g., "FTP Server").

Protocol: Select TCP, UDP, or both (TCP/UDP) based on the service.

WAN Interface: Select the WAN connection you're using.

Public Port: The external port to which traffic will be directed.

Private Port: The internal port on the target device.

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

Click OK to save the changes. 

The rule is set up.