ICRealtime How-to Notes 96026

 

The Basics of Opening Ports (Port Forwarding)

 

Knowing how to open up ports (port forwarding) through your firewall (hardware or software) is essential to being able to gain access to your DVR. Port forwarding is the act of “opening holes” through your firewall to a specific LAN IP address or to the firewall itself. Most common firewalls are referred to the user’s router or modem when on the job. When you open a port, it’s basically allowing specific destination data to flow through your firewall correctly. With ICRealtime’s DVR system, your main concern would be to forward ports only if that client wants to be able to view their DVR from outside their LAN (local area network).  With the basics out of the way, we now have to be sure we have the right information to open these ports in the router/modem or firewall device on the LAN.

 

- The static IP address of the DVR (which you setup in the network menu of the DVR).

 

- The start/end (internal/external, to/from, etc) ports. By default our Flex/Max series needs three ports opened, 32789 (TCP), 37778 (UDP) and 80 (TCP & UDP). By default in our Pro series you need one port open, 9080. Ports on both systems can be changed in the network properties.

 

- The protocols used are TCP and UDP. Some router/modems don’t let you choose both TCP and UDP protocols at the same time so you will need to add an entry for each protocol if this is the case.

 If you have more than one DVR on the same network, the best approach is to set it to use a different set of ports for each DVR, and then set up port forwarding for each of the IP addresses. Also confirm that the gateway address setup in the DVR matches the gateway of your LAN. For instance if your modem or router (which is your gateway) is set to 192.168.1.254 as the local address, you need to set that exact address in the gateway information of your DVR.

Now you may be asking yourself “how do I know how to open ports on all these different routers”. There is a website for just this cause, www.portforward.com . At this website you will be able to get a pictured walkthrough on how to open ports up on specific router/modems. When you get to the site, click on “routers” down towards the middle of the page. Once loaded, choose the router that you are working on from the extensive list (goes by company name and model). To be sure that the desired ports have been opened for the DVR, check with someone at an outside location to try and connect to that public IP address that’s provided from the client’s ISP provider.

Note: The client’s public IP address can be attained by going to a website such as www.ipchicken.com . The bolded numbers should represent the IP address which should be used for the remote connection in to your DVR.