There’s a thing called UPnP you should be aware of, too. Note too, that setting static IP addresses is ALSO outside the scope of this article. Set up an IP address reservation in your firewall/router so that when your hotspot/miner connects to the network the firewall/router ALWAYS gives the hotspot the same IP address.Set a static/fixed IP address in your Helium hotspot/miner so it ALWAYS uses the same IP Address, OR.To fix this problem, you need to do one of two things. This means that every time a device connects to your network, it could be given a DIFFERENT local IP address. Network routers/firewalls use something called ( DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) which allocates internal IP addresses as needed to devices that join the network out of a pool of available addresses. When setting up port forwarding you need to know the IP address of the device on your internal network to which you want to forward the port to. Port forwarding needs fixed/static IP addresses UPDATE: BUT I did just create this video which is a bit of a how-to guide.
#IS PORT FORWARD NETWORK UTILITIES SAFE HOW TO#
Take a look at for advice on how to set it up for your router. A Port Forwarding – How to, this is notĪs I promised, this is NOT a how-to-set-up-port-forwarding-guide. If you learn that your hotspot IS relayed, then it’s worth trying to fix it. This means that other hotspots on the network cannot communicate with you easily and directly, and so information intended for your miner may need to be redirected through another miner – which adds friction, complexity and general slownessīeing relayed seems to also account for fewer witness activities and potentially lost earnings. Sometimes, firewalls can get in the way and your Helium hotspot can become relayed. Helium hotspots/miners need to communicate with one another as peers in beaconing, witnessing and other routine activities, and they need to do it quickly. Port forwarding is what we’re here to understand.
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There’s a little bit more to this in terms of domain name, DNS records and DNS servers, but that’s all out of scope for this article. Now the traffic can make it to the web server and the web content can be displayed without errors. To allow web traffic through the firewall and to your web server, we need to open (or port forward) ports 80 and 443 and forward them to the IP address of the web server on your network. Placing a web server behind a firewall blocks those ports by default. The easiest example to illustrate the port forwarding concept is that of a simple web server.Ī web server needs to accept incoming connections from the internet – typically on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS). With that said, let’s talk about opening some! ? Example – A simple web server
![is port forward network utilities safe is port forward network utilities safe](https://fixthephoto.com/images/content/port-forwarding-wizard-interface.png)
Open or forwarded ports are the most common attack vectors for a network, so you will want to keep as many closed as possible. The act of poking (the right kind of) ‘port’ holes in the firewall to permit certain kinds of traffic from the internet through the firewall via those ports, and through to a specific device on your network like your Helium miner/hotspot.
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It’s also there to BLOCK nasties from the Internet coming into your network through open ports.
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The (very simplified) purpose of a firewall is to ALLOW devices from within your network to safely make connections out to devices and services on the internet. Routers typically have some kind of inbuilt firewall. HTTP (used for browsing) operates on port 80, HTTPS (used for secure browsing) uses port 443, and FTP runs over port 20 or 21, etc, etc, etc.Īccording to Helium’s security doco, Helium hotspots communicate with their peers across the internet on TCP port: 44158. In fact, there are 65,535 ports that can be used for communication in TCP/IP.ĭifferent ports are used for different network protocols and the first thousand or so are reserved for specific applications. Ports and Routers/Firewallsĭevices on the internet communicate with each other over different ‘ports’. There are thousands of different routers and an equal number of ways to set up port forwarding on those devices, so this is NOT a how-to guide! This guide instead, is intended to explain port forwarding a little so it’s better understood, and to give you a few resources to follow to try and organise it for yourself – if you need to. You may have heard that setting up port forwarding is beneficial in certain situations where your Helium Miner/Hotspot is ‘relayed’, and you are probably wondering what that means, what port forwarding is, and how you might go about it…