this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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This post considers the situation where you expose your ports to the internet, on the edge of your residential network, for example by setting your router to forward requests with port 443 to a certain host in your network. In this case you do have a public ip address and the configured port on your home server is now reachable from the internet. This is different from just exposing a port on a machine inside a residential network for local use.
If you set your router to only forward traffic from port 443 to a certain host does this drop all non port 443 traffic to that host?
I'd expect so, but you'll need to test with your exact router model how it behaves. Some have a 'DMZ' function that you can use to pass all ports to a certain host. I use it to expose the WAN interface of my opnsense router to the internet through the ISP router. Then I can fine tune the open ports further in opnsense which is better designed for that than the usual ISP box.
If a port is forwarded in NAT and an application is listening, outside traffic can reach it directly without the application needing to initiate a connection first.
The application doesn't have to actively reach outside, just to listen at that port. If there is no application listening an open port does nothing. Though a port can really only be called open if an application is listening.
That's the point of port forwarding. Yes, normally applications aren't reachable and have to reach out first. That's how your browser can receive answers. With port forwarding you instruct your router to always forward incoming traffic for a specific port to a specific computer in your LAN.
In this case it probably means both. Plus the application listening on the other end. In its purest sense opening a port means having an application listen on that port.