what is port forwarding and why is it used?
In: 7
Every computer on the Internet needs an IP address.
The world ran out of IP addresses a decade ago.
Since then, we’ve been using nasty tricks to get by without having enough. Your home router probably has an IP address on the Internet, but your computer does not. Instead your computer has a “fake” IP address that nobody can actually talk to, outside of your network. And when your computer tries to connect to some other computer on the Internet, your router intercepts the connection and fiddles with it to make it look like the connection is coming from the router’s address. This is called Network Address Translation, or NAT, and it’s absolutely terrible.
When someone else wants to connect to your computer, they can’t because it doesn’t have a real IP address. They have to connect to your router instead. That means the router has to know what to do with the connection, and that is port forwarding.
Because there aren’t even enough IP addresses for every *house* to have one (if you are in a developed country you probably do have one because developed countries got first dibs), many Internet companies also have their own NAT routers. So even *your router* doesn’t have a real IP address, only a router at the Internet company has one. And they won’t let you fiddle with their router’s settings. No Minecraft servers for you. Oh dear how sad.
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*Three* decades ago, engineers saw this would be a problem and made a modified IP protocol with way more addresses, called IPv6 (IP version 6) but only 1/3 of the Internet still actually uses it, mostly cellphones. Call it IP address climate change. If you want to not have port forwarding, there are sites you can use to check if you have IPv6 set up, and sometimes you can call your Internet company and ask them to turn it on for you. Note that to make a connection with IPv6, both ends of the connection need to use it.
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