Finally Got My Ports Forwarded Properly Thanks to a... Power Outage?

[Drew Wilson]

I had a bit of a nightmare with my stupid router. While attempting to forward my ports, it keeps preventing me from changing a few values so that the ports can be forwarded properly.

So, my eMule client has been stuck in a firewalled state for several weeks while I wait for some time to clear up so I can sit down and figure out how to hack the thing to finally work properly since it wouldn't let me edit the port values for a specific client.

At 4AM this morning, there was a power outage which shut down the router as well. I didn't have a clue about it when it happened, but a second power outage happened around 4:45PM. Whatever, just some stupid inconvenience since it only lasted for about 15 minutes. I connected my eMule client and I was no longer firewalled. Turns out, my ports are now properly forwarded and everything is working perfectly finally. o.O

So, to the local electrical company, thanks for forwarding my ports so I can do some more file-sharing without the slow connections - not that you'll ever have a clue, let alone, intended for that to happen. o.O

Yeah, funny and weird at the same time. Had to share it since it was a rather unique occurrence.

[Excrement_Cranium]

Wonder if it was restart related, then?

[RACKnRAIL]

Hmmm...I wonder if it went back to default settings. It's funny, many people don't password protect their routers and/or their wireless networks (unsecured). In my neighbourhood, about 50% of the networks are unsecured.

I've always found portforward.com very helpful for forwarding ports. The info is spelled out in photo illustrations. What could be more simple?

Curious, what kind of router do you have, Drew? Also, do you do firmware upgrades?

[Drew Wilson]

It's a Linksys router. Yeah, Portforward.com was what I used as well because it was nice and straightforward. Unfortunately, the issue I had wasn't anywhere to be found - neither portforward or Google had found a solution. What it was was when I was changing the ports for the client in the settings, the client IP address was somehow 00.000.000.000. That, of course, wouldn't forward my ports properly. So I would change the port to the forwarded port was correct, but an error message would appear, telling me that line 10 had to have a higher port starting value. So I figured that one out and moved the value up one (no biggie since that would forward properly anyway). The error message would then appear, only telling me that line 9 was wrong. So, knowing the pattern, I changed all of them accordingly so the error message would be put up - well, I tried to, but the FTP and all the default ones cannot be modified. It would then kick up the error message again, telling me that line 5 is not correct. The problem with that is that you can't change that line since it seems to be a factory default. Since it thought the line was in error, it wouldn't let me save the new settings, thus blocking me from changing anything on that router page.

I looked up firmware updates and there were some. I took a quick look through the changelog and it made no mention of the issue in question. Was thinking of updating the firmware, but never really got around to it.

Indeed, though, my guess was that the apparent solution was resetting the router and the power outage kind of did that for me. The only strange part is that you have to set the router to accept anonymous connections before any p2p client will be able to work in the first place. If it reset to the default settings, I don't think any client would work properly out of the box.

[RACKnRAIL]

Hmm...I have a linksys. I've never had any trouble, however I doubt it's the same model.

[drtoker]

Does eMule / your router support uPNP? Maybe restarting the router got that to work, and it configured itself for you? Just a guess...

[Drew Wilson]

Yeah, never had problems until I got the new laptop and that was the only hick-up I had outside of software not liking the 64 bit environment (only a small handful of prog's though).

eMule supports UPNP, but the default is set to disabled and I've left that box unticked.

I'm not complaining that it worked, but it certainly is a mystery as to why it worked.