What is Port Forwarding?

 

What is Port Forwarding now maybe you have heard about it but you weren’t exactly sure what it was or How it works?

Hello guys, my name is Vishal and we will talk about what is Port Forwarding and How it Works.

So basically Port Forwarding allows computers over the internet to connect to a specific computer or service within a private network it’s basically making your computer accessible over the internet even though you are behind a router.

So, for example, let’s say a friend of yours at their home wants to remotely control your computer at your home using a service such as Remote Desktop Connection.

Remote Desktop connection is a service built into Microsoft Windows that enables you to connect to another computer running Microsoft Windows and then once you’re connected to the Remote computer you can use that computer programs and files just as if you were sitting in front of it so now your friend is ready to connect to your computer so he starts up the Remote Desktop connection and sends the request to your public I.P. address with a specific port number, So now what is the Port Number?

A Port is not a physical connection but it’s a logical connection that is used by programs and services to exchange information.

Ports uniquely identify these programs and services that are running on a computer and in this case, Remote Desktop connections uses port 3389 so the request with the port number will make its way through the Internet to your router and once it reaches your router. Your router needs to know where to forward the request for port 3389, because without any port forwarding configured your friend will not be able to connect to your computer because your Router does not know what to do with this request.

So this is where Port Forwarding comes in, So now we’re going to tell our router to send or forward any requests that come in with port 3389 and send the request to our computer.

So to do we are going to log in to our router configuration page by typing in the routers internal I.P. address using a Web Browser.

 

So if you are not sure what is your router is internal private I.P. addresses you just open a command prompt on a Windows computer and type “ Ipconfig ” and press Enter. As the above picture, you can see the default gateway is the internal IP address is 192.168.0.1 when you type this command into your computer and It’s also important to know what your compter’s I.P. address is which is right here because we’re going to be entering that I.P. address in the port forwarding configuration page so in a Web Browser.

We have to enter the I.P. address of the router and now we are in the routers configuration page now depending upon what router you’re using the configuration page will be different depending on which brand of router you are using I’m using a Tenda Wireless Router in this example so whatever type of router you are using the layout is going to be a little different but basically you need to go to the port forwarding section to configure port forwarding.

 

 

So here on a port forwarding configuration page we can just enter 3389 and then you have to point it to the IP address of the computer that you want your friend to access which is 192.168.0.5 (Your friend I.P. address) and then we can just save our settings and now we’re done!!

 

So now when your friend sends a request with port 3389 the router knows where to forward that request to and now the connection is complete and now your friend able to connect your pc with the remote desktop service.

 

Now this works very similarly in a network so in a network the router is contacted with an I.P. address along with a port number so now the router will look at the port number and send or forward the request to the internal I.P. address that the port has been configured, so again another request from the internet comes into the network and reaches the router so the I.P. the address has done its job which was to bring the request to the router from the Internet.

So the I.P. address is no longer needed because it has already done its job, so now the router will look at the port number and based on its port forwarding configuration, it will now forward the request to the computer with the I.P. address that the port number has been configured.

Ports are always associated with an I.P. address and they are identified by a unique number so regardless if you see the port number or not a port number is always associated with an I.P. address because an I.P. address always has a purpose and it uses the port number to determine what the purpose is whether it’s pulling up a web page using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) service or using Remote Desktop. It always has a purpose that’s determined by the port number because not only our ports associated with an I.P. address but they are also always associated with an application or process such as FTP, Web pages, Email, and so on..

 

The port numbers range from 0 - 65535 but of the 65,000 there’s a few these that are most common and that is used on a daily basis for example such as :-

• 80 - HTTP
• 20,21 - FTP
• 443 - HTTPS
• IMAP - 143
• POP3 - 110

But these are just a few in fact there is a privileged category of ports that are called the well-known ports which ranges from port 0 to port 1023.

 

 

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