What is Port Forwarding?
Port forwarding, also known as Virtual Servers, is a way of directing traffic from the Internet through the Firewall effect of NAT to a particular PC on your Network that you want people out on the Internet to be able to get to. Typical examples where you might want to do this include running your own website, remote control applications like PCAnywhere, webcams and running your own Game Server. Data travelling across a Network (or the Internet) uses a combination of protocols and ports, and Computers have 65535 ports (ie possible end points or destinations). A lot of these port numbers have common uses and are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. In particular, ports 1 – 1024 are known as common ports, and within this range you’ll find most port numbers used in day to day Internet and Network browsing. For example, Websites use Port 80, FTP is port 21, Send email (SMTP) is port 25, NetBios (File and Printer Sharing) uses port 139 and the list goes on. What happens with
