Port Forwarding Incoming Traffic / Dynamic DNS with Residential Eircom DSL?

Inspector Gadget

Hi All:

Hope I've got this in the right forum. Basically, a friend of mine has asked me to help dig him out of a commitment he made to help someone else get remote access to a DVR connected to his home network from his office (the guy in question is on an eircom residential DSL service, 3Mb. I'm no networking guru (though I can do more than get by at these things), but he was stuck, so I offered to help.

I thought to myself that if I set up dynamic DNS, and punched a couple of appropriate holes in the firewall (I know, a VPN would be a lot more secure, but I have no experience whatsoever with that stuff, I figured try the dumb insecure way first, then work up if possible), and do port forwarding, all should be well. But of course, it wasn't.

After some grief involving telnetting to the router, I got the DDNS working, and I configured the firewall pinholes (one TCP, one UDP) as stated in the manual, but nothing's happening. I suspect that there's a layer of NAT somewhere on the ISP side of the fence that I'm not aware of, can anyone confirm that or am I possibly just doing something stupid? (Yes, I know that's easy to check on-site, but it would help to know this before going back there)

(Trying this on an Eircom-supplied Netopia Cayman 3347W, that's been updated to the latest firmware [edit]that would be the Eircom branded version of v7.4.2r2, to be specific[/edit] - needed to do that to get DDNS capabilities)

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Gadget

layke

http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm

Try port forward they usually help me out

I don't see a Netopia Cayman 3347W on the list but there is a netopia 3347W and a Cayman 3346. It's prolly just labeled wrong, but that site is all u need.

Inspector Gadget

layke wrote:

http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm

Try port forward they usually help me out

I don't see a Netopia Cayman 3347W on the list but there is a netopia 3347W and a Cayman 3346. It's prolly just labeled wrong, but that site is all u need.

Thanks for the reply. I've already done this (as the mechanism for forwarding ports on the Netopia routers is very weird - much different to any other brand of router I've ever looked at), however, the odd thing about this router is that because you have to have firmware version 7.4.1 or later for any form of Dynamic DNS support, I had to upgrade the firmware (from 7.3.3), and to make matters worse, I had to upgrade to an Eircom-specific firmware (provided by Netopia themselves) to be confident it would work after the firmware upgrade, and this looks (and acts) very differently to the guide on portforward.com, though the underlying OS/system hasn't changed much, it would appear.

The main reason I'm posting this question in this forum is that I _think_ I've done everything right in that regard (firewall, port forwarding, etc. etc.), but I'm still getting nothing... I was hoping someone out there had similar problems to me and either found a way around them or learned that there isn't one - I suspect it's possibly related to his choice of ISP and package. I hope it's not (as if it's on my end I can most probably fix it, but...)

Thanks,
Gadget.

Foxwood

Inspector Gadget wrote:

I was hoping someone out there had similar problems to me and either found a way around them or learned that there isn't one - I suspect it's possibly related to his choice of ISP and package. I hope it's not (as if it's on my end I can most probably fix it, but...)

It's not the ISP - people have been able to set up portforwarding on the Netopia, but as you found out, it's squirrely.

Some people have resorted to just disabling the firewall entirely, but as far as I know you have to set up a firewall rule to allow the traffic, as well as setting up the "pinhole".

Inspector Gadget

Foxwood wrote:

It's not the ISP - people have been able to set up portforwarding on the Netopia, but as you found out, it's squirrely.

Some people have resorted to just disabling the firewall entirely, but as far as I know you have to set up a firewall rule to allow the traffic, as well as setting up the "pinhole".

Yeah, I've already done that (and if I've done so correctly, then you can only forward ports to one specific machine on your LAN, as opposed to choosing on a per-port or per-port-range basis? Weird?)

I don't know, I was having a lot of weird problems that day, need to be better equipped next time.

Thanks,
Gadget