[Jansar]

According to my Preferences, my IP address is 10.0.1.13, which obviously is not my real IP address, since this is the address given by the router. Before I had my router I used to have just my cable modem, which gave me my actual IP address, so if I wanted to link something to my Public folder for download, all someone would have to do is to just put in my IP address in their browser and then go download the file.

My question is: where would I find the correct address to link to my Public folder? I'm trying to send one of my friends an iDVD project.

[ghporter]

Your router is doing its job by hiding your computer from the Internet. If you want to expose it so that others can browse through it, you'll need to set up a "DMZ." Depending on the router, you'll find this setting somewhere in the various setup pages. All you do is give the computer a static (fixed, manually entered) LAN IP address, then tell the router that the IP you gave the computer is "in the DMZ." Now the router will allow any and all outside the router to see your Public folder.

Be careful, since if they can see it, they can damage it-or other parts of your computer. This is the Internet equivalent of leaving your front door wide open.

[SWFan]

Well, you wouldn't necessarily have to put the computer in a DMZ. He could specify a particular port for people to access the Public share, then set the router to forward such port requests to the particular computer holding the Public share. This would provide better security than exposing the entire computer to the net.

[ghporter]

Originally posted by SWFan:
Well, you wouldn't necessarily have to put the computer in a DMZ. ... This would provide better security than exposing the entire computer to the net.

Valid point. Most people who use DMZs seem to want to host a variety of services-games, file servers, etc.-all at the same time, which makes port forwarding prety complex.

Of course there are some people who would find forwarding a single port too complex, and they'll just DMZ the machine out of frustration.

Finally, it all depends on the sharing protocol and the router firmware whether or not port forwarding is a viable option. I don't have any experience with sharing over the Internet, so I'll just say that reading the manual on both the router and whatever software you're using to share (whether it's part of the OS or a third party package) is the very first step. After that, play and test.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by ghporter:
Valid point. Most people who use DMZs seem to want to host a variety of services-games, file servers, etc.-all at the same time, which makes port forwarding prety complex.

Of course there are some people who would find forwarding a single port too complex, and they'll just DMZ the machine out of frustration.

Finally, it all depends on the sharing protocol and the router firmware whether or not port forwarding is a viable option. I don't have any experience with sharing over the Internet, so I'll just say that reading the manual on both the router and whatever software you're using to share (whether it's part of the OS or a third party package) is the very first step. After that, play and test.

Not if you port forward everything to one machine... it's rather simple. The downside being only one computer has all the ports forwarded to it. It's not like you can have two Macs behind a cheap router and access both of them from the internet.

[John Strung]

You have to go into your router settings and forward TCP Port 548 to the local IP address of your computer, in your case 10.0.1.13. People on the internet would then access your computer by typing the WAN address of your router which you can find by going to http://www.whatismyip.com

For security reasons, using DMZ is a bad idea.