Windows 8 In Depth

Enabling Access with a Sharing Router

If you use a connection-sharing router on your LAN, you need to follow a somewhat different procedure to enable outside access to services on your network.

You must still open Windows Firewall on the computer(s) providing services, as described in the first six-step procedure in the previous section. Then you must use a manufacturer-specific procedure to set up forwarding for services that you want to expose to the Internet.

One difficulty with these devices is that you must forward services by IP address, not by computer name, and, normally, you will have set up computers to obtain their IP addresses automatically. This makes the computers moving targets, because their IP address could change from day to ...