Can only port forward port 80, other ports does not open.

Question

I am trying to open three ports on my AE (7.6.1), but the only port that actually opens (if set) is port 80.
- The Airport Extreme is the router and no additional router is in place
- I have given the three cameras (that I want to access from Internet) static IP
- I have trired to open three ports for those (45101, 45102, 45103)
None of above ports open, but if I change one port to 80, that port opens and one camera can work. This is really strange and any suggestions or help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

As you don't want to use the modem as router I would recommend to reconfigure your modem into "bridge" mode. In bridge mode it works like a simple modem. You then have to configure your WRT for your internet connection (usually PPPoE for DSL or DHCP for cable). With this setup, you don't have these chained routers and the WRT has a direct connection into the internet (i.e. the WRT shows your public IP address on the Status page).
Some chained router setups shows problems with drop outs, connection loss and similar. I recommend to use only one router in home setups.
On a sidenote: port forwarding is not related to firewall functions. The reason why you need port forwarding is because a router does "NAT" (Network Address Translation). You use private IP addresses inside your LAN (e.g. 192.168.1.*). Private IP addresses are not routed into the internet. Any internet router will immediately drop packets with a private IP addresses. Thus, your router does NAT to map your private IP address to your single public IP address. It's in the nature of this mapping that unsolicited incoming traffic from the internet is dropped unless you configure port forwarding. That's simply because the router would not know where to sent a packet on a port 1234 received on its public IP address unless you tell it. Thus disabling the firewall on a router won't change a thing.