You might have encountered the term Port Forwarding before. Maybe when you were configuring BitTorrent clients such as qBittorrent, trying to get multiplayer games to run properly, or when you encountered other connection issues.
If you post a support question on a forum, it is often suggested to check port forwarding to make sure that this is set up properly; but what the heck is it?
Port Forwarding can be described as a way to tell your router to send specific traffic to a specific computer inside the network. For BitTorrent, it would mean that the bittorrent ports that are used on the device the client is running on are forwarded to that device and not blocked or to another device on the network.
Bittorrent is however not the only possible application. You could forward requests for port 21 to a home ftp server or requests for port 80 to a web server. Multiplayer and online games, especially older ones, may also require port forwarding to work correctly.
Port Forwarding Tester is a simple online application that tests if port forwarding is set up correctly. All you need to do is load the service's webpage and a port number that you want to test. The external IP address is filled out automatically but you may change it if it is not correct. It may also be useful when you are about to test the port forwarding of a different computer.
The application returns either that the port is blocked or open. Open means port forwarding is set up correctly while blocked means that it is not set up properly.
The Port Forwarding Tester lets you test any port on the Internet site. Just enter a port you are interested in and click on the check button afterwards to start the test. The IP should get filled out automatically so you normally do not have to worry about it. If you think it is not correct, check your IP here.
If the port is not forwarded check out the Port Forwarding Configurations page to find out how you can configure your router or PC to do just that.
The application is useful in determining whether port forwarding is set up correctly. It takes just a couple of seconds to run a test. One thing that I wish it would allow you to do is test multiple ports in a single operation. While you can run a common ports test, there is no option to enter a port range or multiple ports.Advertisement
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