About Port Forwarding

Routers
A router is like a post office. When you send a letter to someone, it first arrives at the post office and then it is sent to the recipient. Port forwarding instructs the post office (router or modem) where the letter (data) should be sent when it arrives on a specific port. The router then knows to send the incoming data directly to your PC instead of sending it to another device on the same LAN. If port the data arrives on is not registered with an address the router it will not know where to send the data, but unlike the post office, a router does not have a dead letter office and the data will be ingnored and lost forever. Cable modems and DSL modems can also have routers built into them even if they only have one LAN port.

IP Address
An IP Address is a unigue ID that identifies your network devices. Every PC, network printer and network device on your LAN has different IP addresses so thay can determine one device from another. If all the printers on your network had the same IP address all of them would print at the same time anything you sent to just one of them. Your router has a different IP address so your PC can access the internet instead of browsing a print buffer.

Types of IP Address
An IP Address can be either Static or Dynamic. A Static IP Address is an Address that never changes. A Dynamic IP Address may change if you reboot the device. Some routers allow you to reserve an IP address for a specific device. Reserving an address is like setting a static IP address as that device will always get the same IP address.

Port Forwarding
You do not need to forward a port if everyone you will be connecting to is on the same local network (LAN) as your PC.

If you will be connecting to someone over the internet, your router must know where to forward incoming data. You will need to log into your router and setup port forwarding to send all incomming data on a specific port to your computer's IP address. Alternatively you can use DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) mode instead of forwarding specific ports. Most modern routers have a DMZ mode. This instructs the router to send all data on all ports to a specific IP address. DMZ mode may be the best way to forward from one router to another router as this allows you to control all port forwarding in one place.

If your computer's LAN IP Address changes the data won't be forwarded to the right computer so it is best to use the routers IP reservation feature (if it has one) or setup static IP addresses on any device you forward ports to.

Accessing the Router
Routers usually have a web interface which you can access by typing the router's IP address in the address bar of your internet browser. This is usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 or for most Vonage devices, it's 192.168.15.1. To find the router, you can usually take the LAN IP address of your PC and replace the last digits after the last decimal with a 1 so if the LAN IP address of your PC is 192.168.15.101, your router would usually be 192.168.15.1. If it asks for the password check your router manual or go to www.PortForward.com and find your router from their list. In most routers, the defaults are Username= admin Password= admin or Username= router Password= router. The Port Forward section in your router may be called Virtual Server or called Applicationa and Gaming or called Port Forwarding.

Configuring Port Forwarding tells to your router that data arriving on a specific External Port should be forwarded to the Internal Port with the same number to your PC unless you use Port Mapping, where the External Port is forwarded to a different numbered Internal Port to your PC

A router does a simple job, it just relays data between two systems, it's simpler to setup than it sounds.
You can find Step-by-Step guides for almost any router at www.PortForward.com.

Two Routers
If you are behind two routers you need to forward data from the first router to the second router and then from the second router to your PC. It would be best to just put the IP address of your second router in the DMZ of the first router so all traffic is forwarded to the second router. The second router IP Address can usually be found in the LAN status or Settings page of the first router. Then you can forward from the second router to your PC as if you had only one router.

Port Forwarding Test
The best way to check if Port Forward has been correctly set up is via the built-in port test feature of the Viewer. It's the only way to ensure the data actually reached the Viewer.

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