Muds and Port Ranges

I'm trying to set up a Mud, and am having connection problems. Using a Linksys router, using winmoo.
While people from within my network have no problems connecting, people from the internet cannot successfully connect.
Upon speaking to the tech support people at Linksys, what they told me was that the mud was undoubtably using a series of ports, as opposed to just the one that I have it running on (in my case, 777).
So...has anyone else had a similar problem with a Linksys router? Is it possible that my mud is actually needing a series of ports, rather than just the one it's listening on? Any ideas?
Thank you,
Sarah

MUDs generally only need one port, although some support extra ports for admins, building, PK etc.

I doubt this is the problem, and in any case, what of it? What difference does it make how many ports it needs?

One possible problem is that ports under 1024 are reserved for system functions, I think, which is why most MUDs use ports like 4000 up.

Try a higher port number.

Another possibility worth exploring is whether you are on a network which uses NAT (Network Address Translation). If so, incoming connections can be a problem because they end up at the router, not your PC.

What is your IP address? - the numbers, eg. 123.212.22.13

We can tell from that whether you are likely behind a NAT router. If you are, you may need to arrange for "port forwarding" to forward incoming connections to your PC.

IP address is 192.74.1.101
My router settings do have the option for port forwarding, and I had been forwarding the one port that I was running the mud on to the computer that it was running on (ip address above.) I tried using ports 5111, 6098, and 900, with no success. The internet user that I've been testing with tried connecting to both the ip address of the router, and of this individual computer.
Thank you very much for your assistance. =)
~Sarah

Port 900 above should have been 9000.
~Sarah

Hmmm - I'm wondering about two parts of that message. First, you say your IP address is 192.74.1.101. This sounds like a "real" address, not one using port forwarding.

RFC 1918 says that three ranges of address are to be used for private (internal) networks, there are:



Your address is not in that range. Thus you should have a "real" address, and are not using NAT. If you are not using NAT then you shouldn't need to forward the port, the address should be accessible in its own right.

However if you *are* behind a NAT router, then you have a problem. Your internal address 192.74.1.101 and the "real" 192.74.1.101 address are going to be different, thus someone connecting to 192.74.1.101 won't end up at your PC.

However if you are using port forwarding, and someone connects to the router address, then they have some hope. However it is possible the port forwarding is not working correctly.

You're not behind a firewall are you? If so, the port would have to be opened for outside connections.

click your start menu and then click run.

then enter :

ipconfig /all

this will display your computer ip address, possibly something like 198.162.1.3

you go into your router settings and then NAT. Then input port 4000 and your COMPUTER ip address as above.

That tells the router to send any incomming traffic on port 4000 to your computer.

for instance. i have several computers with muds on - one ip address is 198.162.1.3 and the other is 198.162.1.69

yours will be similar no doubt.