Port forwarding

Port-Forwarding!

Port forwarding is simply making a specific port on your computer accessible from the outside world, or the World Wide Web.

    “Wuts a ‘Port’, lul??”
You probably know that computers can run locally hosted web applications. Hosted applications, mostly called servers, are bound to a port on the machine they're running on. For instance, the Minecraft server's default port is 25565, Many FTP (file transfer) servers are run on port 80 or 75. Those are just examples though, and I can’t say I actually know why those numbers are common.

    External/Internal IP
[Firstly]
Routers however are the things that directly interact with the World wide web. Your computer *indirectly* interacts with the rest of the world, via your router. This is because of technical crap and limitations about how routers receive info from the web - basically routers help make the internet faster for computers (rather than 3G-like wireless).

Anyways you can prolly guess that Internal internet is the wifi around your router. External is the rest of the World Wide Web. Thusly, an external IP address belongs to your router and an Internal IP address belongs to any machine (computers mostly) that use the router.

That’s about it. One other important thing is the default gateway, which is the internal IP adress of your router. The default gateway is important because it is the way to access your router page if you have wifi.

1. Obtain your default gateway
     The reliable way of doing it (windows)
      - Open cmd (command prompt)
      - Enter the command “ipconfig”
      - This may show multiple connections. Use your brain here.
            - If you’re using wi-fi, you’ll probably be looking for the field under
             “Wireless LAN adapter Wireless network...”
            - Many routers have a default gateway of 10.10.10.1, 10.10.10.2 or 192.168.0.1
      - This work similarly with macs - just use the mac version of command prompt, and you should be okay

2. Enter the default gateway into a web browser’s address bar. In chrome, all you have to do is paste the sucker in there. In other web browsers, you probably want to put http:// in front of it.

3. This should bring up your router’s control panel. This is where it could get tricky. With normal, commercial routers, you will have to enter in a username and password to access it.
      - Guess. Many times it’s still the default username and password, which could have usernames like:
          - Admin (and many variants of this word)
          - User
          With passwords like:
          - 1234
          - admin
          - 1234567890
          - password
       - To access my router I use “admin” as the username and the password.
       - You may not be lucky enough to guess the password correctly. Finding it out is up to you then -
       some people ask nicely, some may sneak around trying to find it written down somewhere in the manuals
       (me). It would probably be much easier to ask.

4. If you’ve gotten to your router page, yay! You (almost) did it! Now you just need to find where to manage forwarded ports.
       - Look around. Don’t mess around, look. Get to know your router before you give it a bunch of
       commands to do work for you.
       - In my router page (Linksys), it’s under “Applications and Gaming”. Your port managing page may have
       fields like “Start from”, “End to” and “Protocol”.
       - You may want to just google how to do it now that you’ve gotten here. I managed to guess it when
       first was learning this, but you may have a more difficult router to deal with.
       - Adding a port to forward, you must include:
           Application Name
           Port number
               some routers allow a range of ports. this is where you’d see “start” and “end” fields in the
               control panel. Like it says it allows all the ports between those two port numbers to be
               forwarded. If you’re only forwarding one port, just use the same number for both of them
           IP adress (internal) of your computer (use ipconfig again, if you forgot this)
       - They may include these fields too:
           Protocol (use the default choice, or guess, then google)
           Enable (obvious, but when check it means this port will be forwarded)