Smoothwall, Port Forwarding and ADSL

[r1zeek]

Well, ADSL is imminent for me (In the next 3 hours according to BT) and I've been looking at my smoothwall install (trying to set up my router behind it)

Now, i've been looking at port forwarding (and finding out about it) and it says that port forwarding exists for ports that are not covered by NAT (source: http://www.portforward.com/help/portforwarding.htm) and I was wondering, will I need to set up Port Forwarding on my Smoothie for all the programs I use (e.g. MSN, IRC, Games etc)?

Thanks in advance guys

[Moby-Dick]

you dont need to port forward outbound for smoothwall.

[r1zeek]

Ohh right, cheers for that.

[RVF500]

Port forwarding is another term for PAT (Port Address Translation). It's used in place of NAT (Network Address Translation) when your usage overwhelms the number of global (public) NAT addresses you have. For example you are hosting a small server farm and only have 2 public NAT IP addresses assigned by your service provider. At a busy time a server would have to wait until one of it's neighbours terminated a session before it was accessable to the outside world. PAT assigns the address to a TCP port and forwards it in this way using one of your public addresses. Therefore the limited address issue can be worked around.

Normal home ADSL use won't do this so as moby said. leave it as default.