Technical ConfusionBecause Technology Is Confusing

Port Forwarding

Yesterday I went on a mission. I wanted to find out how I can block World of Warcraft on my network.

Sometimes babyboy shows signs of addiction to the game, and I feel the need to be a mean parental unit, and I want to block it. I use the parental controls on the game, but he can see his restrictions. There are times when I don’t necessarily need him to know he’s being restricted, allowing me to play my “I don’t have a clue” card.

So I went on a quest to block it. I have not found a way to block World of Warcraft, instead I found a way to allow the stupid game.

When a patch for the game is downloaded, it sucks up all the bandwidth. I mean, it makes the loading of a simple text webpage impossible. And in my research I discovered that World of Warcraft behaves better when you enable port forwarding.

I have no problems with port forwarding on Linux. You do it manually, and I have snippets of the commands on my hard drive. But my router gives me a GUI and thus I’m not always sure what to put where, and my guess last night was incorrect.

I found a site to help me with all that. It has pictures and everything! It will tell you everything you never wanted to know about firewalls, routers, port forwarding, and port triggering – and explains what those things are. It has lists to guides for most any router or firewall out there, and is written in easy to understand manner.

http://www.portforward.com/guides.htm
http://www.portforward.com/