Billion Electric Company BiPAC 8501/8521 Virtual Server Port Forwarding, Add Virtual Server, 144

Billion BiPAC 8500/8501/8520/8521 SHDSL (VPN) Firewall Bridge/ Router

Virtual Server (“Port Forwarding”)

In TCP/IP and UDP network, a port is a 16-bit number used to identify which application program (usually a server) incoming connections should be delivered to. Some ports have numbers that are pre-assigned to them by the IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), and these are referred to as “well-known ports”. Servers follow the well-known port assignments so clients can locate them.

If you wish to run a server on your network that can be accessed from WAN (i.e. from other machines on the Internet outside your local network), or any application that can accept incoming connections (e.g. Peer-to-peer/P2P software such as instant messaging applications and P2P file-sharing applications) and are using NAT (Network Address Translation), then you will usually need to configure your router to forward these incoming connection attempts using specific ports to the PC on your network running the application. You will also need to use port forwarding if you want to host an online game server.

The reason for this is that when using NAT, your publicly accessible IP address will be used by and point to your router, which will then deliver all traffic to the private IP addresses used by your PCs. Please see the WAN configuration section of this manual for more information on NAT.

The device can be configured as a virtual server so that remote users accessing services such as Web or FTP services via the public (WAN) IP address can be automatically redirected to the local servers in the LAN network. Depending on the requested service (TCP/UDP port number), the device will redirects the external service request to the appropriate server within the LAN network

Add Virtual Server

Because NAT can act as a “natural” Internet firewall, your router protects your network from being accessed by outside users when using NAT, as all incoming connection attempts will point to your router unless you specifically create new Virtual Server entries to forward those ports to a PC on your network.

When your router needs to allow outside users to access internal servers, e.g. a web server, FTP server, Email server or game server, the router can act as a “virtual server”. You can set up a local server with a specific port number for the service to use, e.g. web/HTTP (port 80), FTP (port 21), Telnet (port 23), SMTP (port 25), or POP3 (port 110), When an incoming access request to the router for a specified port is received, it will be forwarded to the corresponding

144

Chapter 4: Configuration