Alternatives to Port Forwarding and Nat

Sometimes, you can not do what you need to with port forwarding and port triggering. Lets say you want to host multiple games on multiple computers inside your network, well you can only forward ports to one of those computers. So you wouldn't be able to do what you want to. ISP's sometimes do firewalling for their end users. They end up blocking the ports that the end users want to open.

Well there are ways around most of these problems, and your ISP should be able to work with you on resolving them. If your ISP does not want to work with you, change ISPs. We pay ISPs for "service". Not just internet service, also tech support, customer service relations, and the ability to give us what we want. Most customers and ISP employees forget about this....

One option you have when port forwarding does not work, is to have your ISP hand/point several ip addresses at your router. Once this is done your router would have several external ip addresses. You could use the nat section of your router to direct one of these external ip addresses to one internal ip address. Basically every port would forward from the one external to the one internal. So your computer would have a external ip address. Only some routers can be setup like this. It is a very nice functionality, because you can still use the firewalling portion of your router to block most ports.

Another option you could try, is to have your ISP setup your connection as a bridge. In this configuration your router, doesn't route. It acts like a hub. You router doesn't have an ip address. The ip addresses that your computers use are assigned to them by your ISP. Your router basically becomes transparent to your network, like it wasn't there. Then you ISP can assign public ip addresses to every computer on your network. That means that every computer is connected directly to the internet. You can run anything you like without a configuration change. When you are set up like this, it is a good idea to run a personal firewall.