Port Forwarding

[scubagal]

I have a Belkin 54G wireless router that I would like to get into to forward ports. I have looked at portforwrding.com and printed off what to do, but I feel like it stops short. Is there a more in depth guide on how to forward ports out there? Also, the site said that I had to setup a static IP address. I didn't realize that that was something that I could control. Since I have more than 1 computer connected thru this router, do they all have to have static IPs?

[Erik]

This is a pretty simple thing to do. I bet once you get it done you will agree.

Do you NEED a static IP? Not really, but it will make things a lot easier and reliable. You only need a static IP on the computer(s) you want to forward ports to. The reason being that if for some reason the IP changes (like happens when using DHCP) you will forward ports to an address that either has no computer associated with it, or has a computer not setup for those services.

All you do is login to the router, and find the port forwarding section. Then put in whatever ports you need forwarded, and the destination IP of the target computer. Nice and easy.

One word of caution when setting static IPs. You can either do a static reservation on the router or manually set the static IP in the PC. If you are like me (to lazy to look up the MAC address required to do a reserved IP) you will setup a static IP on the computer. Make sure if you do this it is outside of the range managed by DHCP. This will avoid any possible IP address conflicts down the road.