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So why exactly would you need to forward ports? While some applications take advantage of NAT to set their own ports and handle all the configuration for you, there are still plenty of applications that do not, and you’ll need to give your router a helping hand when it comes to connecting services and applications. Depending on what is listening, it’ll be expecting requests to be made in either one or the other of these protocols. UDP, or User Datagram Protocol, is less widely used in home applications with one major exception: BitTorrent. TCP, or Transmission Control Protocol, is what’s used most commonly. Plex Media Server uses port 32400, for example, and Minecraft servers use 25565-both numbers that fall into this “fair game” territory.Įach port can be used via either TCP or UDP. To avoid interfering with other standard-abiding applications, it’s best to use larger numbers for these alternate configurations. Other ports don’t have pre-assigned uses, and you can use them for whatever you want. If you send an http request over a different port-say, 143-the web server won’t recognize it because it’s not listening there (although something else might be, like an IMAP email server which traditionally uses that port). The receiving computer’s software knows that port 80 is used for serving http documents, so it listens there and responds accordingly. When you fetch a web page, for example, it uses port 80. Some ports have specific applications which are standards throughout the computing industry.
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Once computers became sophisticated to run multiple applications, early computer scientists had to wrestle with the issue of ensuring applications connected to the right applications. Back in the day, when computers could only run one application at a time, all you had to do was point one computer at another computer on the network to connect them as they would be running the same application. So where do ports come into this process? Ports are an old but useful holdover from the early days of network computing. Because of the NAT, everyone in your household can request web sites and other internet content simultaneously and it will all be delivered to the right device.
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This function occurs at the router level where the NAT acts like a traffic cop, directing the flow of network traffic through the router so that a single public IP address can be shared among all the devices behind the router. This is thanks to a wonderful bit of routing magic known as a Network Address Translation (NAT).