Opening ports on EE Brightbox2 Some work some don't???????

Hello chaps, I ahve a client that has the EE Brightbox 2 and a new fiber to cablnet service.
Because I'd not port forwarded this router before I went to the EE website and read their guide.
The instructions were very comprehensive and i followed them to the letter.

There are two CCTV servers, I set oe to DHCP and rebooted then allowed the Brightbox to allocate an IP, I went into the router DHCP settings and reserved that IP and saved
I then went in and turned off the DHCP and allocated the server a device id of 201 i.e 192.168.1.201). I then restrted the CCTV server and went into the Brightbox DHCP and modified the reserved address accordingly so the reserved address was now 192.168.1.201.
I did one CCTV server first and then the other (201) to ensure I allocated the correct device against it's mac address. I then checked the basic settings and conected devices and both showed up correctly. To prevent any potential for IP conflicts I reduced the DHCP range from 2 - 199. saved and restarted the BB2.

Now I went into the NAT section and created my devices and allocated ports against my reserved IPs.
When I checked them not one single port reported as open. I left it for an hour and some ports were open and others not?

Any ideas or suggestions where I might have gone wrong? Or do you think there might be an issue with the router?

PS when i try to ping the ip address it always comes back 100% packet loss.

I don't have experience with this box, but generically, this is what I would do:

- Alter DHCP range to give me plenty of room for static, so 192.168.1.50-255 say.
- Allocate static IPs in the 162.168.1.1-49 range to CCTV & servers etc.
- Check subnet, gateway etc. on static devices too.
- Open ports to static IPs.
- Enable ping from internet (probably the cause of your packet loss).

If you've manually configured the IP on a static device, and opened the port, it should work.

To troubleshoot you could connected a laptop in place of the device, allocating it the same static IP, and use/write an app on open up a port on that machine. Then try and connect through from the internet.

When opening ports, I'm assuming that you're mapping external port X through to IP Y, also on port X?

Cheers,
AP

In reply to a post by mistabalista:

I went to the EE website and read their guide.

Linky please?

This is not a fibre query but a Brightbox or router query. Better in General, EE or Home Networking for max. visibility.

I just had a HEATED argument with a EE technical support engineer. Apparently the box doesn't support static Lan addresses. I never heard of such a thing but he insisted that I set the CCTV DVR toreceive a DHCP address and use that address when port forwarding to the ports I want and change the reserved IP address back to that which the DHCP allocated. Using it's mac address as a reference point the port forwarding rule changes and so does the reserved IP according to the IP that the DHCP allocates in each session.

Frankly I have never heard of such a thing but at this stage I am willing to give ANYTHING a try.
Today i's too late to get at the router but I am dedicating tomorrow afternoon to getting this one sorted It still doesn't explain why some ports open and others don't.

But just to quote EE's website,

Before setting up a Port Forwarding rule, it's a good idea to reserve an IP address for your computer (or device). You can do this from the DHCP option in Advanced Set-up. You'll find more help in the article reserving an IP address.

IT DOESN'T SAT ANYTHING ABOUT STATIC LAN ADDRESSES

APPARENTLY THIS WAS DONE TO MAKE SETTING UP PORT FORWARDING EASIER FOR THE NON TECHNICAL AND IN SO DOING MAKING IT MORE DIFFICULT FOR THOSE OF US THAT HAVE BEEN TEARING OUR HAIR OUT TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHATS GOING ON. RANT OVER

I'll report back if this is correct or some technician in Bombay trying to get me off the phone by making up a plausible lie.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by mistabalista:

I went to the EE website and read their guide.

Linky please?

http://is.gd/vZlUfx Was easy enough to find but....

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

This is not a fibre query but a Brightbox or router query. Better in General, EE or Home Networking for max. visibility.

Thanks but frankly I was so worn out by thinking it through I couldn't even decide where to put this one.

In reply to a post by AndyPandy:

When opening ports, I'm assuming that you're mapping external port X through to IP Y, also on port X?

Sorry I didn't quite understand this bit? I taught myself poert forwarding as I couldn't find a convenient course. I used port forward.com and youtube university and now I can genrally manage any port forward but this one has me reeling. Tomorrow will tel if what I was advised
by Mr Bombay (oh blimey) from EE.

I'm not familiar with the Brightbox but usually you can allocate an IP address to a specific device using it's MAC address and the DHCP server will always give that device the same IP address, effectively a static IP address. This way you don't have to specifically set up a static IP address on the device and it can be left to obtain the IP address from the DHCP server.

You then setup the port forwarding using this reserved IP address because it will never change. I think that is what the tech was getting at but not really explaining it properly.

It's the way I set up all the devices on my network that require static IP addresses for port forwarding or QoS purposes.