DSL and NAT'ed customer addresses

[Jason Clinton]

Hanasaki JiJi wrote:
> Any thoughts on how he might run a server that can have connections
> initiated to it from anywhere on the net?
>

If he's behind a NAT he needs two things:

1. The ability to update the IP address of the router to a dyndns
service like dyndns.org so that no matter what his IP address is at any
given time, you can still find it from outside his NAT.

2. The NAT needs to be able to 'port forward' the port the particular
server would run on. IE: port 80 for HTTP, 21 FTP, 22 SSH, 23 Telnet, 25
SMTP.

If you have the ability to let people know you're running on some odd
ports then you'll be better capable of avoiding your ISP's probes for
users running service (which is a violation of most end user
agreements). In the case of SMTP, you don't have a choice because all
SMTP servers look at port 25. In the case of HTTP, however, you could
distribute a URL that contains the port number it in like this:

http://archemides.homeunix.org:8888/
(i don't actually have an http server running here)

--
Jason Clinton
I don't believe in witty sigs.