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The difference is that with a firewall, you open the port and that's that. With port forwarding, you get whatever port happens to be available. If done manually
by franga2000 5y ago
The difference is that with a firewall, you open the port and that's that. With port forwarding, you get whatever port happens to be available. If done manually, you have to tell the other sode which port to use. If done automatically (like upnp), you need to do that every time your port changes.
- tsimionescu 5y agoThere is no difference of opening a port in a firewall or a NAT (well, as long as there is a single machine that wants to listen on that port, at least). And some kind of UPnP will still be required even if your internal network were using ISP-assigned IPv6 addresses for protocols that want to open multiple connections, like VoIP conferencing, bit torrent etc. Of course, if you have an internal network where you actually communicate between your various machines, you won't want to use ISP-assigned publicly routable IPs, since those can change at any time, so you'll also need some kind of network address translation at the edge.
- franga2000 5y ago> well, as long as there is a single machine that wants to listen on that port, at least Well yes, most networks have more than one machine and multiple users might want to run the same service. > you'll also need some kind of network address translation at the edge. Not at all, each machine gets two addresses - one routable from the ISP and one non-routable from the router. Internal services simply use the non-routable ones.