If you're trying to set your Netgear router up for portforwarding, what you'll be doing is telling the router to forward network packets that come in addressed to a specific port on to a particular machine on your local network (i.e., a machine that sits behind the router, with the router between it and the internet).
Specifically, if you go to the portforwarding section of the router's administrative webpage, you should see something that looks like the attached image (which I clipped from the Netgear
Reference Manual).
![[IMG]](images/storyImages/image217)
With reference to that image, first you should click the radio button named "port forwarding," next, you should choose from the drop-down menu the particular service that will be using the forwarded port (i.e., what's going to be coming in from outside), finally, in the four form fields under the (misleading) heading "Server IP Address" you should type in the
local IP Address of the particular computer to which packets coming in for the service you've chosen should be sent.
So, let's assume for illustration that you were running a private webserver on one of your machines to which the local IP address of 192.168.1.99 had been assigned (which IP address should also be "reserved" to that machine, see below). What you would do is, from the pull-down menu, find an entry like "HTTP" (I think that's what Netgear uses to refer to incoming web requests), next you would type 192.168.1.99 into the four form fields under the heading "Server IP Address" and, finally, you would click on the "Edit Service" button if you needed to change any of the default settings.
For example, the default port number for HTTP is 80, so once you set up port forwarding to forward HTTP requests to IP 192.168.1.99, the router would fill in the blocks in the table at the bottom so it would look something like this:
| # |
Service Name |
Start Port |
End Port |
Server IP Address |
| 1 |
HTTP |
80 |
80 |
192.168.1.99 |
If, however, you were running your webserver on port 7854 (I dunno, maybe because you wanted to limit the number of "accidental" tourists
), you would click on the "Edit Service" button, which would bring up another page that would allow you to change the start and end port numbers to 7854, so that afterwards, the table above would look like this:
| # |
Service Name |
Start Port |
End Port |
Server IP Address |
| 1 |
HTTP |
7854 |
7854 |
192.168.1.99 |
And, if you wanted a range of ports forwarded to that machine, say ports 7854 through 7902, you would put those numbers in as the start and end ports, respectively, and the table would then look like this:
| # |
Service Name |
Start Port |
End Port |
Server IP Address |
| 1 |
HTTP |
7854 |
7902 |
192.168.1.99 |
Finally, if you want to add a service that isn't described on the drop-down menu, you would click the button "Add Custom Service" which will bring up a page that should look like this:
![[IMG]](images/storyImages/image218)
Based on my discussion above, hopefully this part should be more or less self-explanatory at this point. Let me know if it's not.
Now, the only fly in the ointment is that I cannot tell for sure whether or not your Comcast modem/router, which sits between the Netgear router and the Internet, is going to cause any problems with this - basically, you'll need to check with the users manual for the Comcast modem/router to see if it filters out incoming requests to certain ports - some ISPs do that in order to reduce the amount of incoming bandwidth that gets used (basically, they don't want you running a commercial or public website from behind a private, residential internet account).
Provided that the Comcast modem/router doesn't present any issues, to get back to my example, let's also assume that the public IP Address Comcast assigns to your account is currently set as 74.73.201.109 (I'm just making it up), and that you've used a dynamic DNS service to relate the URL hereiam.nobody.org to your public IP address, including all sub-sub-domains such as www.hereiam.nobody.org. If someone whom you wanted to access your private webserver were to type in http://www.hereiam.nobody.org/, that person's browser would obtain the IP 74.73.201.109 (I'm ignoring ISP subnetting issues here, of course), and the GET HTTP request would be sent to 74.73.201.109:80 (that is, to port 80 on your public IP address). alternatively, that person could type in hereiam.nobody.org:80/ and get the same result. Now, if you've changed the port numbers from the usual ones, as in the last part of my example, then a person attempting to access your private webserver would have to type in something like http://hereiam.nobody.org:7854/ (basically, if you're not using the standard port for, e.g., HTTP, you have to specify the port at the IP address you're attempting to make a connection with).
Lastly, as to "reserving" an IP address: the Netgear router can reserve a particular IP address for a given MAC address so that the same IP address gets assigned to the same machine each time; you should do this with whatever computer you want the ports to be forwarded to so that they always get forwarded to the same computer; otherwise, you'll be at the mercy of the DHCP server on the router, which will assign IP addresses willy-nilly, and will cause big headaches with your port forwarding scheme.
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Last edited by a moderator:
May 7, 2015
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