This tutorial will teach you how to forward a port or port range on your Linksys router.

In this tutorial, I will be using a Linksys WRT54G2 router with Firmware Version: 1.0.01. As long as your router is by Linksys, you should be able to follow this tutorial and notice very minimal differences, if any. Please keep in mind though, that each router model and firmware version is different and there's no guarantee everything will match up perfectly unless you're using the same model and firmware.

First, open up your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, doesn't matter) and type in the default gateway (IP address of your router). Unless you've manually changed it, it's IP address will be 192.168.1.1. So, open up the browser and type in '192.168.1.1' without the quotes.

You'll be prompted to enter a username and password. Hopefully you have set this, and it's not the default. If you haven't, you should consider doing so. The default username is admin, and the password is left blank, insert that if you haven't set a password.

Now that you're logged in, you'll see a series of options near the top of the screen, select "Applications & Gaming," seen below:


In this router model/firmware version, it takes you straight to the "Port Range Forward" submenu. It should look something like this:

Notice that I am already forwarding three different port ranges.

I will disect this picture category by category. First, the "Application" category. You can enter anything in here, this is just to make a note to yourself so you know what application (program) for which you forwarded the port. For example, if I was forwarding port number 46124 for utorrent, I would put 'utorrent' in the Application category so I know why that port has been forwarded.

The "Start" and "End" categories are where the port numbers go. In my screenshot above, you can see I forwarded all the ports from 2300-2400 in one single entry. This means that I forwarded 100 ports, starting with 2300 and ending at 2400. In my second entry, you can see that the "Start" and "End" are the same, 47624. This is because I only needed to forward a single port, so I made the "Start" and "End" the exact same. Notice I did this for my third entry as well.

The "Protocol" category can either be Both, TCP, or UDP. Unless you know the differences, it's best to just leave this as "Both," since a lot of applications will use both protocols to access the internet.

In the "IP Address" category you must enter the local IP of your computer's network interface. To better understand this, I'll give you a scenario. Let's say I have two computers connected to a Linksys router (192.168.1.1), Computer One (192.168.1.100) needs port 10743 forwarded, while Computer Two (192.168.1.200) does not need that port forwarded. This would mean that in the "IP Address" field, I'd enter 100, so that the router would forward port 10743 only for Computer One. So, to know what number to insert in your situation, we must figure out your local IP. Open up the command prompt by going to Start > Run > cmd. After this is open, type ipconfig. You should see something displayed like this:


As you can see, my local IP address is 192.168.1.100. And if you look at the screenshot where I already had some ports forwarded, I used '100' in the "IP Address" category, since that is my computer's IP address. The only thing you have to be careful of, is that your IP address does not change, you can monitor this by typing in ipconfig at any time. In most situations your IP won't change, and if it does, it will probably only happen when the PC is rebooted. If it does change, you can always go back to your router settings and enter a new IP, or manually configure your network interface to use the same IP every time.

Now that you know your IP, fill in the "IP Address" category, then check mark the "Enable" box. If you ever need to temporarily disable the port forwarding but don't want to lose all the settings, just uncheck that "Enable" box. Now click "Save Settings" and you're done!

Having trouble? Contact me via email: admin@tr1x.com