How Port Forwarding Differs From Port Triggering; Set Up Port Forwarding To Local Servers - NETGEAR R6250 User Manual

4. Your router performs Network Address Translation (NAT) on the source IP address, and
sends this request message through the Internet to the remote computer, which displays the
web page from www.example.com.
To configure port forwarding, you need to know which inbound ports the application needs.
You can usually find this information by contacting the publisher of the application or the
relevant user groups or news groups.

How Port Forwarding Differs from Port Triggering

The following points summarize the differences between port forwarding and port triggering:
• Any computer on your network can use port triggering, but only one computer can use it
at a time.
• Port forwarding is allowed only for the computer that you specify on your network.
• With port triggering, you do not need to specify the computer's IP address. The IP
address is captured automatically.
• Port forwarding requires that you specify the computer's IP address during configuration,
and the IP address can never change.
• Port triggering requires specific outbound traffic to open the inbound ports, and the
triggered ports are closed after a period of no activity.
• Port forwarding is always active and does not need to be triggered.

Set Up Port Forwarding to Local Servers

The port forwarding feature lets you allow certain types of incoming traffic to reach servers on
your local network. For example, you might want to make a local web server, FTP server, or
game server visible and available to the Internet.
Use the Port Forwarding/Port Triggering screen to configure the router to forward specific
incoming protocols to computers on your local network. In addition to servers for specific
applications, you can also specify a default DMZ server to which all other incoming protocols
are forwarded.
Before you start, determine which type of service, application, or game you want to provide,
and the local IP address of the computer that will provide the service. The server computer
has to always have the same IP address.
To ensure that your server computer always has the same IP address, use the reserved IP
address feature of your product. See
R6250 Smart WiFi Router
Address Reservation
Security
74
on page 36.