Port Forwarding / Static IP

aikendrum

Greetings,
I'm currently using broadband from a small eastcoast wireless provider, who shall for the moment remain nameless. I'm paying just under 50euro a month for theoretical 600k/400k connection (which actually works at 1/2 to 1/4 of that speed most of the time...but thats another story).

My connection is through a non user serviceable NAT router connected to the wireless aerial. The reasons given for the non user servicability of this router are a) Its used to throttle bandwidth at this end, and b) my provider doesn't have an ip address for each user, and needs to spread out the address's they have through the use of their routers. Apologies for any technical stupidity in this explanation - I'm not a techy.

Anyway - due to this router I'm unable to download large files from the web (as the connection dies out when it can't ping the router, I think), play online games, use bittorrent, kazaa, shareza etc (for which I have uninfringeing uses ). To cut a long story short I looked this problem up on the web and found that the normal solution is to use port forwarding to selectively open ports. I got a list of the ports required (I'm already running zonealarm, and not running XP, so I'm not too worried about not having 100% 'protection'), and mailed this to my ISP.

Now they're telling me I'll have to pay 10euro extra a month for a dedicated IP address.

Apologies for the length of this. Here's are my questions 1) Is this technically necessary ? Would port forwarding alone not fix this problem. 2) Is this normal behavior for an ISP, what experiences have others had ?

Thanks.

Bass.exe

Simple answer - you don't need a fixed IP. NAT just takes incoming traffic and 'deflects' it to one side. If you use pinholing (a.k.a. port forwarding) then it just allows traffic to come through on those ports.
I'm on €ircon broadband, and I don't have a fixed IP, but I do use pinholing. All that happens is that the router is pinged, and if there is a pinhole in place, it forwards that ping to your local IP address (as in 192.168.0.1 - or whatever).
This would all be done by the end user - not the ISP... unless the ISP has closed specific ports to prevent P2P activity... which is possible, but not usual.


As for whether this is normal ISP behaviour... I'll leave it to someone else to answer.

Blaster99

What don't you ask your provider to ensure that you can play online games etc and let them worry about the technicalities? As mentioned before, you definitely don't need a static IP address.

Bass.exe

No, no, the point is, his router, as in the thing sitting on/under his desk, may be the problem (and in all likelyhood IS). The router (which has NAT) is taking all the pings incoming, and discarding them. He needs to pinhole(port forward) so that the pings reach his machine. This is a USER problem. The ISP can do approx. SFA about this. Although I have to say, most routers will let games through ok. It's more.... bittorrent and the like that get stopped.

Edit: Heh, one byte's worth of posts

aikendrum

Blaster99 wrote:

What don't you ask your provider to ensure that you can play online games etc and let them worry about the technicalities? As mentioned before, you definitely don't need a static IP address.

I've had six months of asking them to sort out stuff like this, and they always respond with technobabble..So I read up on it as much as possible.

aikendrum

Bass.exe wrote:

No, no, the point is, his router, as in the thing sitting on/under his desk, may be the problem (and in all likelyhood IS). The router (which has NAT) is taking all the pings incoming, and discarding them. He needs to pinhole(port forward) so that the pings reach his machine. This is a USER problem. The ISP can do approx. SFA about this. Although I have to say, most routers will let games through ok. It's more.... bittorrent and the like that get stopped.

Edit: Heh, one byte's worth of posts

Bass, as I said in my original post, the router is NOT user servicable. Its passworded, and while its web control can accessed via an address entered into firefox, its passworded and not servicable under the terms of my contract. I don't own the router and it was supplied (on a rental basis) by my ISP.

Bass.exe

Ah, ffs. That's retarded. Who is your ISP? User Servicable I took to mean changing it in some fundamental way. NAT is merely a feature of a router, one which I would expect the ISP to let you tinker with.
If THIS is the case, give your ISP a metaphysical smack upside the head, and tell them to take their fixed IP and shove it.

There is NO reason to stop someone accessing their router. Ok, yes, access should be restricted so that they don't open up the throttle, but... argh... what a retarted ToS.
So, are you saying someone from "da company" has to come out, and play with the router? Or remote access? Sweet Zombie Jesus.....

morphirr

Great site for setting up portforwarding http://portforward.com/default.htm