Salient Soft

This is fairly straightforward, but appears to be subject to the fundamental limitation that the Fritz Box cannot make use of multiple external IP addresses for the port forwarding, even if you are on an 8 port subnet like I am. I made absolutely sure that the Fritz Box was aware of the subnet by accessing its menus, then navigating to Home Network/Network on the left menus, and then clicking on the Network Settings tab. You then click on Additional settings to reveal some extra settings, and then scroll down and then click on IPv4 settings. Finally, if you scroll down and look under Public IPv4 Subnet you will see the public subnet visible/allocated to the Fritz Box, as a prefix and network mask.

In my case this was clearly an 8 port subnet, but unfortunately the fritz box only allowed port forwarding using the primary router public IP address.

I managed to work within this limitation however, as you can still forward multiple different ports to multiple different local devices. For example, to enable inbound RDP access to a PC as I did, do the following:-

1/ Visit Internet/Permit Access on the menus, and then click the Add device for sharing button.

2/ Select the target PC/device at the top, then at the bottom click New Sharing, which configures the desired sharing for the device.

3/ Then Click the Port Sharing radio button (as opposed to the default My FRITZ! sharing). Under application, I selected MS remote Desktop as the Fritz box was aware of RDP. You can select Other Application and enter the ports manually if you are working with an application that the Fritz box is unaware of.

4/ You then have 3 ports to configure, which is slightly confusing – I was not clear on all of this and the online help was blank on some of this detail. When I selected MS Remote Desktop, Port to Device and through… were both set to 3389, which was the correct internal port to use for RDP. Below this was Port requested externally, which is the actual external port you want to use. In one case therefore I left the defaults, but for a second PC, I set the external port to 3390, which allowed me to use the same external IP address for 2 different RDP configuration to access 2 different internal PCs successfully. I was not clear however what the distinction between Port to Device and through… was all about, but did not need to touch it.

5/ When accessing via the MS android RDP app, I was able to configure multiple PCs as required, and could also configure both Lan and internet configurations of the same PC so that I could access it both ways from my phone. A key trick here is that this app does allow a different RDP port to be used. Under PC name for the internet, I set the target IP address (the public IP address of the router), and appended a different port using e.g. :3390 notation to use port 3390 instead of 3389. You are able to give an additional friendly name for the PC when doing this, which is useful when configuring external IP access. Internally on the lan you can just use the standard windows network names. This then all worked fine and I was able to use my phone both to remotely access the fritz box to wake the PC, and then remote login using the MS RDP app to access it.

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As I found previously, there were a number of things to get right to make this work, as follows:-

1/ The bios settings for the motherboard need to be set correctly to enable it, and whether/how to do this varies depending on the motherboard. My older Gigabyte Z77-D3H at version F18 did not have a setting to enable this, but it turned out that it worked anyway once all the other issues were correctly address as below. My newer Asus Prime Z690M-Plus D4 did need a setting changed, and this was somewhat subtle. For this motherboard, from the home page you need to visit Advanced Mode/Advanced/APM Configuration/Power on by PCI-E, and enable this option. Note that you only find out from the prompt when you actually visit this option, which is labelled as PCI-E, that it also affects the onboard LAN as well as any PCI-E adapter. This was not clear.

2/ In Windows 10 and 11, open the control panel and visit Hardware and Sound/Power Options, and then select “Choose what power buttons do” on the left menu. Then click “Change settings that are currently unavailable” at the top, and this enables the “Turn on fast startup” option, which should be disabled. Whilst I am not certain that this is required, it was cited in this post re wake on lan, and turning it off did not slow boot time noticeably on my PCs, so I left it on.

3/ You then need to change the network adapter settings. Open the device manager and located your network adapter. Check the advanced settings and ensure that Wake on magic packet is enabled. Then, under the power management tab, allow this device to wake the computer, ensure that Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer is enabled. Again, I am not certain that the latter is absolutely required and I did get some intermittent behaviour when testing wake on lan, but in the end I have left this enabled, as I have no current requirement for any other way to wake the computer.

4/ On the Fritz Box 7530, wake on lan is built in. Navigate to Home Network/Network using the menus on the left, and then select the device that you want to wake. Note that it may be under active connections or idle connections in the list, and it is not clear what an idle connection means – a pc that is on/booted can appear in the idle connections list. Either way, this does not matter. You just click on the pencil icon as if to edit the settings for that device (even though you are not changing anything, this is where you will find wake on lan). Scroll to the bottom and you will see a button labelled Start Computer, which will successfully perform a wake on lan if all is in order. Note that to the left of this button is a check box labelled Start this computer automatically as soon as it is accessed from the internet. Whilst it might be convenient to enable this to save a manual wake on lan via the fritz box when accessing from the internet, I have elected not to do so at present as my needs for this are infrequent and it gives additional protection for the lan, as a remote fritz box access is needed to trigger this, which is of course password protected. However, doing it automatically would be a lot more convenient as accessing the fritz box remotely to do the wake on lan is perfectly possible and relatively straightforward, it does require several steps.

Once all this was done, I achieved consistent wake-on-lan behaviour using my Fritz Box 7530 to perform the wake on lan, as per this post here.

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