Problems with Portfowarding reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zSpectre0458z · 2023-10-03 23:45 ive been trying to setup port forwarded servers for a while now but it always seems to act up. i setup a static IP for my machine, portforwarding in my router and am able to connect to any and all of the game servers on my home network. the problem comes when i try to enable others to connect to it from outside of my local network. any ideas? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SahSon · 2023-10-03 23:55 There's a few things to clarify here. Your LAN working doesn't confirm WAN connections are going to work as well. How have you enabled port-forwarding? Does your WAN IP address in your router match what "what is my ip" google searches return? You'll need to confirm that your not behind NAT (or worse Double NAT or CGNAT) by your ISP. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zSpectre0458z · 2023-10-04 00:01 So I use the WAN IP and not the local IP? or is the WAN IP the one I need to give to the people using the servers? (I was able to find my IP online) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SahSon · 2023-10-04 00:07 You would need to give them your WAN IP (external IP you see from "what is my IP"). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zSpectre0458z · 2023-10-04 00:12 Oh, I see. thanks a ton. I've been giving them my LAN IP. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SahSon · 2023-10-04 00:16 Just throwing this out there... its generally a BAD idea to open ports up haphazardly on your router for external connections to any service without any sort of security layer. Its pretty widely discouraged. Be careful plz. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- zSpectre0458z · 2023-10-04 00:21 Gotcha, I'll definitely be careful. thanks again. I was thinking about getting a web address and doing it through that but i dont know where to begin with that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ithakaa · 2023-10-04 01:11 how many people are connecting, if a manageable number I would suggest you look into Tailscale and disable portforwarding altogether ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lolinux · 2023-10-04 03:54 Your external IP is how the internet "sees" you. Your internal IPs are not accessible from the internet, they are only accessible from your LAN. Port forwarding means that you want to allow access from the internet (external) to a computer/service running in your LAN. If you want to share something with friends from outside your network, you choose a random port on your router that's not already taken (from 1 to 65535) and forward that port to whatever port you are using internally (for example 8081 for some web service). You then need to give then both your external IP and the port to be able to connect. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AntiAoA · 2023-10-05 05:11 Network administrator here.....you won't be careful. Its impossible to when forwarding ports unless you're also restricting the inbound requests from your specific user's IPs. Please dont do this. Set up Tailscale/ZeroTier, or some other VPN for allowing them to access your machine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BCIT_Richard · 2023-10-05 21:25 Not a Network Admin, but I recently setup 3 routers(2 were repeater bridges) on my network so I feel qualified to say, Yeah No Op don't do this. I use Tailscale for my personal vpn and love it. I use cloudflare with tunnels for my website, and subdomains.