Port controls for Linksys/Cisco WRV200

[mnewsome]

Need to learn about checking which ports are open... for inbound and or outbound. Not sure if the term 'port forwarding' is the same thing as opening the port. Have accessed the router interface page but it is not clear to me which page is specifically for opening/closing specific port numbers.

 

[schm1tty]

Yes, port forwarding is what you are trying to do.

http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Linksys/WRV200/WRV200index.htm

This is the port forwarding guide for your router. Find the program that you are trying to forward the port for, and then the guide will show you which port numbers to forward and how to do it with your router.

The one thing that you will need to do first before you can forward the ports to your computer is give the computer that you want to forward the ports to, a static ip address. The reason that you need to do that is because normally routers are set to change your ip addresses every so often(DHCP) and port forwarding is done by ip address, so if you see that your ip address is 192.168.1.5 and you forward a port to that, tomorrow your computer might have the ip address 192.168.1.7 and your router will still try to forward the port to the ip 192.168.1.5. I hope I actually make sense here lol.

The link that I provided will also tell you to make sure that you have a static ip address and it will provide you instructions on how to do that.

I hope this helps, or at least gives you more insight on what you are trying to achieve, good luck!