It's important to understand Firefox, Quake, etc are NOT doing
anything. The issue is who's initiating the connection. Your router
is working the magic.
When you pull up Firefox on your computer the request is then sent the
router which then repackages in a special way so it will be able to tell
which computer sent the reply when it gets a response back. This is
called Network Address Translation(NAT). So you pull up Firefox on your
computer it sends the request to the router. The router repackages it
and sends it on to "the interenet" it reaches google, google replies
your router. Your router than repackages the reply and send it to the
appropriate computer based off of what information in the reply.
So let's say want to set up a web app on your side of the router, and
you want computers on the other side of the router to be able to use
it. What ip address do you give to people on the other side of the
router? After all the ips your computer is using is only valid with in
that network(It's all part of the whole nat thing). If you go to
whatismyip.com you will see a completely different ip then if you run
ifconfig. So if you give people the ip address of the router(which is
the one you will get from whatismyip.com) then when they type the IP
address into their browsers they are sent to your router. Your router
doesn't know what to do since this is not a reply to a packet it sent.
So it has no idea which computer to send the packet to.
I hope this helps you understand what is going on.
Kyle
_______________________________________________
UPHPU mailing list
[email protected]
http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu
IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
