Help Forwarding Ports

Endurance Man

So im trying to forward a port on my router. Iv gone to trusty http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm and they tell me i must first set up a static IP address.
Now i went through their instructions until it got to STEP 9. on this page: http://www.portforward.com/networking/static-xp.htm

It says if those spaces are blank you already have a static ip, but how do i find out what this is? I cant really continue until i know this.

Cheers
Endo

Anti

www.whatismyip.com

Endurance Man

Cheers, still cant get the damn thing to work ><. I plow on.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Endurance Man wrote:

It says if those spaces are blank you already have a static ip, but how do i find out what this is? I cant really continue until i know this.

No it says...

You should see a dot in the "Obtain an IP address automatically" box. If you do not, your connection is already setup for a static ip.

I'd put it another way and say if you don't see IP address stuff filled out here and your network is running, then you've got a dynamic LAN IP.
To set a static IP you want to select "Use the following IP address" and fill in the values.

The best way to go about finding the values you should stick in here is to see what you're being auto-assigned in the first place.
Open a console (start > run > cmd) and enter ipconfig
Here you should see a list of network adaptors and their assigned IP details.
If there's more than one - find the one you use to connect to your router (they should have names).

Just to give you an example, this is what my ipconfig shows for the network adaptor I'm using to connect to the router:
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

If everything is as it should be - the Default Gateway should be the IP address of your router... so you can copy that over to the 'Default Gateway' field in your TCP/IP properties (where you're setting what your static IP will be)
The Subnet mask is basically what determines how many IP's you can have in that network... in the case of 255.255.255.0 ... this means you can leave the first three numbers of the IP address alone (192.168.1) and change the last octet (in my case .3) and still be on that network. (think of '255' and '0' as 'on' and 'off')
If you had something like 255.255.0.0, then you could change the last two numbers and must leave the first two intact.
Again, copy whatever subnet mask you see reported by ipconfig.

Actually, picking your own IP isn't that important... even if you were to take the IP you see in ipconfig and stick it in TCP/IP properties, you'd be alright.
You'd just be forcing it to use that IP from now on.

Then for the DNS servers, you can just bung in the IP of the router again if you're having problems... not 100% sure if it's always needed though.

DonkeyStyle \o/

anti wrote:

www.whatismyip.com

It's worth pointing out that in this case we want to set a static IP on the LAN connection from the PC to the router... I don't think the article is suggesting you need a static Public IP from your ISP. (though I didn't read it )

irlrobins

DonkeyStyle \o/ wrote:

I don't think the article is suggesting you need a static Public IP from your ISP.

It's not, you're correct.

BadCharlie

I was doing this to my modem the other day and all i had to do in the end was turn the fire wall settings down to low. And my dl speeds improved so much. Guess i was lucky i did not have to change any other settings.