Don't forget your modem can be a router too!

Well, I spent a few hours last night setting up my webcam to be viewable from the internet. I have a Panasonic BL-C131A and so far I like it a lot. I had it working from my internal network just fine but I decided that I'd like to be able to access it from the internet.

So I set up port forwarding on my Vonage router which sits right behind my DSL modem. I tested from the internet and darn it... it wouldn't work.

So I thought.... maybe the ISP was blocking port 80 to prevent web serving from home. So, I changed the port on the webcam and confirmed it worked from the inside network. Changed the port forwarding on the Vonage router. And tried again. It still wouldn't work.

I couldn't tell if the Vonage router wasn't port forwarding or if maybe my "test" from the internet had a firewall that was blocking streaming or something to that effect. Oh yea, and the Vonage router has something that says "WAN blocking..." What is that? The help says that it blocks incoming from the WAN. Too general of a help file really doesn't help me here. So, I experimented with the setting and it didn't make any difference.

So I went to Shields Up to do a port scan on my home router. I only set it to scan the specific port I was interested in. Well, it reported that the port was "Stealth." I was stumped.

But then I happened to notice that my Vonage router had a 192.168 for a WAN IP. Ah hah. Another NAT and maybe another source for my problem.

So, I logged into my DSL modem and realized that I needed to get traffic from the WAN through. So, I turned off NAT. Because, really, I don't want two firewalls to deal with on my home connection. But, that broke everything and I didn't feel like figuring out why. Probably has something to do with a static route that might need to be set up.

I turned NAT back on and then found that the DSL modem also had a port forwarding option. So, I setup a port forward to forward to my Vonage router to work in conjunction with a port forward to my webcam.

Tested it... and voila... finally.

Lesson learned.... - sometimes modems are really routers. Too bad it took me a couple of hours to figure that out.

Cheers for now!
Clyde