Port Forwarding on Verizon Router

[steveh-52]

I want to forward port 80 to a linux Apache server on my network. I add the rule in my Verizon router but it does not work. When I access the external IP it forwards my http port 80 request to my router admin login. This is not what I want and seems like a security problem. I don't want any external access to my  my router. This seems bad. I don't see any other contradictory rules. The only other rule I added was for remote desktop.

Can anyone please point out something I may have missed.

Thanks,

[Capricorn1 · Accepted solution]

I doubt you can get the Verizon router to stop intercepting port 80 (and probably port 443 [https]) requests. I believe that they use those ports for management and connection tests if you call customer service.

I would configure your Apache server to listen on a different port. Something like 8080 or 8180. If you later start to use https, you could add 8443 or 8543. If this is Apache2 on Linux, check out the /etc/apache2/ports.conf file. Then, create a port forwarding rule to match. 

Alternatively, you could change (or should be able to change) the port forwarding rule to forward from port 8180 to port 80 on your Apache server. I'm not sure that all Verizon routers let you change the port number being forwarded to, but they should.