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open/forward ports to multiple PC's/IP's

vexingv

Golden Member
i have a linksys wrt54g router hooked up to a desktop and airport on a powerbook. i want to be able to open up ports for both the desktop and powerbook, however in the port forwarding section of the router setup, it only allows you to forward ports to one given ip address (192.168.1.xxx). is there anyway to open up ports on multiple ip's? also its seems like i've run out of room to open more ports (there are only ten slots) is there anyway to add more?

thanks
 
Depending on what you're trying to do, you could just use different port ranges for each machine's applications. Like if you want to run game servers on each one, then run one on like port 2001 to 2010 and the other on 2011 to 2020, or the same for whatever else, if you're allowing inbound connections. Just on the other end you'd have to have the incoming client specify what port to use, although for a game server most current games already have the port visible and used from their server browser.

If you've run out of port forwarding (no way to increase them past 10), you could switch to ranges instead of individual ports, although that means forwarding ports you aren't actually using. So if you want to forward ports 80, 21 and 23, you can make a single line to forward 21 to 80 to that IP. But you still can't forward one port to more than one IP.

High-end routers can forward based on the source too, and other variables, so you could forward the same port to different IPs, but you can't afford those. 🙂 And of course you can still only have a port open once at a time on the WAN, but port remapping frees them up pretty quickly if it's common like FTP or HTTP.
 
yeah i want to forward the same ports to multiple pc's (for example gaming or p2p)...also the ports of the two system differ all the time since they go offline and come back with a newly assigned ip (though i guess i could turn off dhcp on the desktop and give it one ip but i still want the same ports forwarded onthe other computer.).

a lil off topic but how do software firewalls (eg. kerio/tiny) compare to hte hardware one in the router (i still use the software b/c it also covers outgoing traffic)
 
You cannot forward one port to more than one IP. If you could forward it to more than one IP then the router wouldn't know where to send the traffic to comming in on that port. Like Lord Evermore said, best way to do this is to assign different ports to the same services. If you have run out of options in the router, then use ranges.

Software firewalls (in my case Sygate and ZoneAlarm) will allow you to monitor what programs are trying to access the web, this way you can prevent unauthorized programs (like spyware) from ever getting through. If you have a hardware firewall then using a software firewall also, for the purposes of preventing unauthorized access, is kinda useless unless someone on your Lan is trying to break into your computer. If you will be forwarding a range of ports and not using all of them, then it will be best to also run a sofware firewall.
 
Originally posted by: vexingv
yeah i want to forward the same ports to multiple pc's (for example gaming or p2p)...also the ports of the two system differ all the time since they go offline and come back with a newly assigned ip (though i guess i could turn off dhcp on the desktop and give it one ip but i still want the same ports forwarded onthe other computer.).

a lil off topic but how do software firewalls (eg. kerio/tiny) compare to hte hardware one in the router (i still use the software b/c it also covers outgoing traffic)

You could forward ports based on source IP's.
For example, port 21 from 1.2.3.4 gets forwarded to 192.168.0.1 while port 21 from 2.3.4.5 gets forwarded to 192.168.0.2, and so forth.

Doesn't sound like what you wanna do though.
 
The short answer like everyone has said is no. The only possible ways around this would be what Sunner says or to try and set it up with Network Load Balancing in Windows 2000/2003 Adv. Server. This is probably beyond what you're looking to do. NLB would allow you to do this since each computer would share the same IP. Given that you're using a Mac as one of your machines though, that's not very possible 😉

Just something to keep in mind in the future though "just in case".

Cheers!
 
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