What does port forwarding do?
In: 6
We ran out of IP addresses a decade ago. Since then most people have been using a stupid trick called NAT so there can be more than 4 billion computers on the internet. A router intercepts the internet traffic coming from your computer and adjusts it so it looks like it’s coming from the router. That way only the router needs to have a real IP address and your computer can have a fake one.
Internet traffic is two-way. When the router gets traffic addressed to it, it has to figure out which computer it’s actually for. As long as your computer initiated the connection, that’s easy.
But if another computer on the internet initiates a connection to your router then your router has no idea which computer it’s meant for. So you have to tell it. That’s port forwarding.
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Engineers predicted that we’d run out of IP addresses a decade ago, **three decades ago** and designed an upgrade called IPv6 which has zillions of addresses. You can Google an IPv6 test and see if you have it. If not, you might or might not be able to get it turned on by calling your ISP (Internet company). In IPv6 there is no need for NAT or port forwarding. You can just put a Minecraft server on your computer and people can connect to it, no fuss. (But they need IPv6 as well)
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