Allowing Inbound Connections To Your Network; How Your Computer Accesses A Remote Computer Through Your Router - NETGEAR WNR2200 - N300 Wireless Router User Manual

8. Type a number between 1 and 15 as the metric value.
This represents the number of routers between your network and the destination. Usually, a
setting of 2 or 3 works, but if this is a direct connection, set it to 1.
9. Click Apply to have the static route entered into the table.

Allowing Inbound Connections to Your Network

By default, the WNR2200 router blocks any inbound traffic from the Internet to your computers
except for replies to your outbound traffic. However, you might need to create exceptions to this
rule for the following purposes:
• To allow remote computers on the Internet to access a server on your local network.
• To allow certain applications and games to work correctly when their replies are not
recognized by your router.
Your router provides two features for creating these exceptions: port forwarding and port
triggering. This section explains how a normal outbound connection works, followed by two
examples explaining how port forwarding and port triggering operate and how they differ.
How Your Computer Accesses a Remote Computer through Your
Router
When a computer on your network needs to access a computer on the Internet, your computer
sends your router a message containing source and destination address and process information.
Before forwarding your message to the remote computer, your router must modify the source
information and must create and track the communication session so that replies can be routed
back to your computer.
Here is an example of normal outbound traffic and the resulting inbound responses:
1. You open Internet Explorer, beginning a browser session on your computer. Invisible to you,
your operating system assigns a service number (port number) to every communication
process running on your computer. In this example, let's say Windows assigns port number
5678 to this browser session.
2. You ask your browser to get a Web page from the Web server at www.example.com. Your
computer composes a Web page request message with the following address and
port information:
• The source address is your computer's IP address.
• The source port number is 5678, the browser session.
Customizing Your Network Settings
N300 Wireless Router with USB WNR2200 User Manual
v1.0, September 2010
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