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Monday, June 12, 2006

Port forwarding with and/or through two (or multiple) routers and/or modems for Azureus (or stuff like World of Warcraft)

I need to work on my SEO'ing...anyway, today I discovered, with much relief, that it is quite easy to get port forwarding working with two routers if you know how, and thought I'd share it with the world. I was trying to download Xubuntu with Azureus for my old 266 (that's mHz, i.e. 1/6 the speed of a half-decent computer) in my room and was disappointed to see the yellow smiley face, indicating that once again, my port forwarding/NAT wasn't working. So I decided to take another stab at it. And I found a help page from Slingbox that I was able to modify to work in my case.


Basically, you have the first router (probably your modem, the one between your comptuer and the second router) forward to your second router, and then set up the second router normally. So here are some step-by-step, simple instructions. For help on how do to some of these steps, check out PortForward.com, a very helpful site, hopefully you can figure out what for.



  1. Go to the first router's setup page. Set the DHCP server to serve only one address (in my case 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.2)

  2. Now, on the same modem, set up Port Forwarding to forward your port (any random number between 0 and 65536, such as 12345) to the same address - 192.168.0.2 in this example, on both UDP and TCP. (Please, set your port to something more random than 12345).
    Tip: I set my first router to forward a range of 10 ports (i.e. 12340-12349). You'll see why later.

  3. Save/restart/whatever to apply those settings. Then go to your second router settings.


Now, there are two ways to do it from here. Way One is best if your compy has a static IP. If you don't know what that is, or your compy doesn't, Way Two is best for dynamic (opposite of static) IP's, it uses the 10 ports mentioned above, and is my own invention.
Way One:

  1. Go Start->Run and type "cmd." Press enter.

  2. Type "ipconfig" and not what is under "IP Address"

  3. Configure your second router to forward the port(s) used in the first section to the IP address you looked up in step 2.

  4. Hopefully, once you apply the settings, all should be well. If not, try the slingbox page for more elaborate directions.


Way Two:

  1. In the settings for your second router, find the DHCP settings, and note the range of IP's being assigned (jot them down, if necessary.) The example here will be 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.255.

  2. In the port forwarding section set up each port with an IP address as follows:

  3. Map the first port (12340 in the example) to the first IP being assigned (192.168.0.100 in the example). 12341 to 192.168.0.101, and so on for the next 10.

  4. Once you apply the settings, you can adjust your port as your IP changes without resetting the routers. If your port isn't working, do Steps 1-2 of Way One. If your IP is 192.168.0.104, use port 12344. 192.168.0.106 = 12346. Get it?


Hopefully, I've made sense and been helpful. 'Cause this was making me crazy, and I finally got it working.

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