my attempt to explain port forwarding gone horribly schizo.....

[Shauk]

I was assisting with helping someone set up port forwarding on their linksys on another forum. I think I got a little carried away. It happens.

maybe some useful information for someone here too

it's not that hard.


1st some basic networking

each computer and device on your network has an internal IP address.

by default, the linksys will have 192.168.1.1
that means your linksys, my linksys, your mom's linksys, that hot chick across the street, oh yeah baby, her linksys too. /rawr

depending on the model of linksys, it will start handing out IP addresses to anything on it's ports starting at 192.168.1.100 thru 192.168.1.255 (or is 255 reserved? I forget, bah)

I doubt you have that many computers on your network so disregard that.

anyway.

we have to draw the line between the internet, and the internal network. I mean obviously if everyone is running around with 29418957 linksys's with the same IP address, you'd have a traffic accident. The signal would be all reading it's lil roadmap, the offramps signs would be all like

and they'd all say 192.168.1.1 !!!!
your signal would then just stop trying and shoot himself. **TIME OUT**

basically ANY 192.*.*.* address is going to be INTERNAL only. It's ignorant of the fact that there are other 192's ending in the same address, much like we're ignorant of the possibility an of a parallel universe.

TYPICALLY how this works is your modem, be it cable, or DSL, (which is kinda important to know and you left this detail out) will have it's own internal IP address too (for example, qwest DSL modems (actiontec model) tend to start at 192.168.0.1



lets just say for the sake of simplicity in explaining this because... I haven't even got to the beef of it all yet.... that...

the minute the "signal" leaves your house, it's translated to a public ip address.

so warcraft is like "hey i'm hosting a game at child-prodigy's house yall! my ip address is 64.34.22.100 on port 6112!

so someone is going to try to connect to that, now... 64.(whatever it's a made up IP address, point is it's the PUBLIC one that the people joining your server are going to be telling thier computers to try to join)

so the signal is heading towards you because HEY that IS your public IP address but, OH NO! it doesn't work? why?

because the signal hits the modem, which then hits the linksys which is responsible for routing and it's looking at this port 6112 request going "great, wtf man, I have more than one computer here, and no one told me to expect any 6112 crap, and i know *I* certainly don't have a port 6112 so... gtfo!"

so gtfo it does.


what you need to do, to properly tell this poor little dumb confused linksys what needs to happen next time mr. 6112 comes knocking... train that butler right, Batman knows whats up. I suggest you rename your linksys "Alfred" in his honor.

you need to know what address mr. linksys/Alfred has set you up with.

you can do this by typing ipconfig in a prompt window (I can elaborate on how to do this if you really need me to)

ipconfig will then tell you what your ip address is.

this is the number you need to put into the port forwarding section of the linksys, along with specifying 6112 for the port.

it may also ask if it is UDP or TCP

I'm not even sure, just make an entry for both UDP and TCP and you'll be fine.

[Jinn]

o ........ k?

[MexicanOnABike]

very informative.

[blahblah454]

This is all you ever need to use to set it up. Follow these pages:

http://www.portforward.com/english/r...outerindex.htm

And if you are setting up a static IP then go here:

http://www.portforward.com/networking/staticip.htm

[catback]

Your explanation is too simplified for me to understand kind of like a NASA engineer trying to read "Rocket Science for Dummies"