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Advanced Settings — Port Forwarding
A TCP “port” is a number associated with a protocol providing a specific service. The
source and destination port numbers are the first parts of a TCP packet.
Port forwarding is often used in conjunction with Network Address Translation
(NAT). When you use NAT, your LAN appears to the rest of the world to be a single
machine with the IP address of the Wireless Gateway's WAN port. Requests from
outside your LAN will all be directed to this address. Port forwarding is a means of
using TCP packets' destination port number to determine which machine on the LAN
each such request should be passed to.
In short, port forwarding lets you provide TCP-borne services such as FTP (the File
Transfer Protocol) and HTTP (the Hypertext Transfer Protocol of the World Wide
Web) to machines outside your LAN even if your servers' IP addresses are hidden
from those machines.
To view the Port Forwarding settings panel, click Port Forwarding in the command
panel at the left edge of your browser window (if the command does not appear there,
click Advanced Settings at the top of the window first). The Port Forwarding settings
panel will appear. The controls in this panel are explained below.