Linksys wireless-G router firewall of hell

[Sephiroth2088]

Does anyone else find the routers with built in firewalls just make online gaming to difficult? Anyway until yesterday I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the relationship between a firewall and port forwarding. My understanding was that if you disabled the firewall the ports do not have to be forwarded. So I disabled the firewall on my Linksys wireless-G router but yet I still could not play the game I wanted to online. (age of empires two) This router seems to make forwarding ports difficult if you have a dynamic IP adress because in order to forward a port you have to input the machines IP adress which in my case is constantly changing with each log onto the computer. So basicaly I need to forward the ports 80, 443, 6667, and 28000-29100 and I have no clue how to do so, so I'm hoping some other gamer out there is using this same router and can help me.

[Dr Unne]

I have a Linksys router, though not the same model (nor a wireless one). I have a static IP address for one of my computers, and dynamic for the others; that's likely what you want. Go into your router's config and enable DHCP. That will cause your router to give out dynamic IP addresses to anyone who asks for one. There should be a setting like "starting IP address" which is the first IP address your router will give out via DHCP. Set it to 100 or something like that, so that 192.168.1.100 will be the first IP given out via DHCP. On the computer you want to have a static IP address, set it up NOT to use DHCP, but to request an IP that's below 100, for example 192.168.1.2. Use something like IP 192.168.1.2, broadcast 192.168.0.255, netmask 255.255.255.0, gateway 192.168.1.1 or whatever your router's IP is. (Those are the settings I use, yours may vary.) Your router should happily give it to you. Then you just have to set the router to port-forward to 192.168.1.2 and you'll always get it there.

Don't just disable the firewall. Hardware firewalls are you friends. Be careful forwarding ports too. I can't imagine why a game would require port 80 or 443; I assume you're running a web server? Just be careful.

[crono_logical]

I think there's some option to set a certain machine as DMZ or something in some routers (dunno if it applies to these routers), which will let you keep the internal IP dynamic and still have the ports forwarded to the correct machine.

Adding to Unne's post, I would not forward 6667 either, since that's the default for IRC/chat servers, and I don't see why a games require that open. You shouldn't be getting any traffic on that port (in general) unless you're knowingly running such a server.

[Sephiroth2088]

Well there's a light on the front of the router that say DMZ so I'm assuming there is a way to enable it. Until now I've thought it just stood for demilitarized zone... but whatever lol.

[Doomgaze]

The DMZ's not the best option - it's better just to forward the ports you need. The DMZ would open all of them.

[crono_logical]

Can't DMZ be combined with the internal firewall, or is that too complex a function for a router to do?

[Doomgaze]

the DMZ is, by definition, outside of the firewall, is it not?

EDIT: "unaffected by the firewall" might be a better word choice.

[crono_logical]

I don't know what DMZ is even short for, only heard about it But to me, that's pretty stupid if it operates outside the firewall and there's no other way to define a default/main PC to forward ports to regardless of what IP it's been assigned

[Endless]

DMZ = DeMilitarized Zone.

It's useful if you want a machine of your network accessible by everyone (a web server for example, smtp, ftp, dns), while all the rest is hidden behind the firewall (a sql server, intranet datashare, whatever). As far as the outside is concerned, you connect only to the DMZ prt of the network, and the rest of the network is isolated, so the DMZ is a buffer between the outside (usually the net) and the inside (the intranet).