Netgear and Port 80

Question

Netgear routers and I are not the best of friends, but we are starting to get along a little better now. The problem started when I first bought the router. I had to work long hours back then so my brother, who was visiting at the time, hooked up my cable modem and my router. I never thought he would store a password in my router that I wouldn't be able to figure out. Oops! So with much dread I hooked up my computer to the router with an ethernet wire and depressed the reset button. The router faithfully returned to its factory settings.

After this, I typed in www.routerlogin.net and a Netgear webpage appeared. It informed me that I needed a firmware update. When I initiated the update, the computer got stuck and kicked me off the net. Needless to say I wasn't happy. I turned off the power to my computer, my router, and my modem. Then I turned the power back on in the reverse order. I got my internet back. I was happy.

The firmware finally installed (I think) and I was able to change the password on my router to something I wanted. Then the webpage displayed a port forwarding hyperlink. Again, I'm an idiot. I don't know how to set up port 80 or port 8080.

So here comes the question. How do I set up port 80 or port 8080 without setting up a static web address? I look forward to any feedback on this question. I'm so scared of setting up a static web address on my computer. I've heard too many horror stories about this.

Answer 1

OK, understanding your frustration, why do you think you need to set up port forwarding for port 80 or port 8080? You would only do that if you wanted to host a service running on one of those ports on a computer on your internal network and make that service available to the "internet", which is not what it sounds like you want to do.

Answer 2

There are two issues here.

• Your ISP dynamically allocates a public IP-address to the Internet interface of your router. Because this can change from time to time, your friend can't use a fixed IP-address to contact your PC reliably.

• Your Netgear router uses DHCP to assign a private IP-address to your PC. Therefore your PC's IP-address may also change from time to time. This makes it hard to configure port-forwarding to forward port 80 to your PC.

The solution is therefore in two parts:

• Use a dynamic DNS service to provide a fixed name for your LAN. For example, DynDNS, No-ip or FreeDNS, etc

• Configure your PC with a fixed IP address, so that it won't change unexpectedly. You could use the one it has currently and just configure the router to exclude that address from the range it uses for DHCP.

Then set up port forwarding in your router.

Note that you are exposing your PC to HTTP attacks. You should take care of the security of your PC - It might be prudent to use HTTPS (therefore different ports), require HTTP logins, guard against SQL injection, etc.